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Praise for Adriana Herrera

Praise for the novels of Adriana Herrera

“Herrera is consistently one of the most prescient, thoughtful romance writers today, always finding compelling ways to weave vital topics into her scorching-hot love stories.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Herrera excels at creating the kind of rich emotional connections between her protagonists that romance readers will find irresistible.”

—Booklist, starred review

“Sweet and thoughtful, but delightfully filthy, too.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Herrera’s work remains compulsively readable. She crafts lively Latinx characters with instant, electric chemistry that sings on the page, and handles realistic obstacles in a relatable manner.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Incisive and modern, navigating the complexities of privilege, purpose and power, all while exploring intense passion.”

—Washington Post

“Herrera…deftly charts the struggles of finding love and friendship in unexpected places.”

—Library Journal, starred review

“Adriana Herrera writes romance with teeth—you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll be refreshed and inspired to fight even harder to create the vibrant, welcoming America in which her books are set.”

—New York Times bestselling author Suzanne Brockmann

“[Adriana Herrera] is writing some of my favorite Afro-Latinx characters and giving us beautiful love stories along the way.”

—National Book Award winner Elizabeth Acevedo

“Herrera masterfully combines the fun, gooey, interpersonal, romantic stuff with plots that are firmly grounded in reality and involve social justice. The result is contemporary romance that matters, stories that reveal an abundance of
inconvenient truths about society.”

—Book Riot

Also by Adriana Herrera

Also available from Adriana Herrera
and Harlequin

Dating in Dallas

Here to Stay

Las Leonas

A Caribbean Heiress in Paris

Sambrano Studios

One Week to Claim It All

Just for the Holidays…

Dreamers

American Dreamer

American Fairytale

American Love Story

American Sweethearts

American Christmas

Also available from Adriana Herrera

Mangos and Mistletoe

Finding Joy

Caught Looking

Her Night with Santa

Monsieur X

Dedication

To my sister, Lorena.

A hustler like no other. Scholar, dogged researcher, firefighter, adventurer and a truly phenomenal tía.

Prologue

Alba

Julia: You can do this amiga! Drop that motherfucker like a bad habit and break free from that eight-pack addiction.

Nobody should have to put up with this much wiseassery from their best friend at five in the morning, but here we were. The eight-pack in question did not pertain to beers—or anything I was allowed to consume—but rather to my boss’s extremely off-limits abdominal muscles.

Alba: Julia what the hell are you doing up this early? It’s like four in the morning in Dallas?!

Julia: I set an alarm, boba! You think I was going to run the risk of you going to see that pendejo without a pep talk?

Julia had not very good feelings about my employer and had been hounding me to quit my PA job for months...and it was mostly my fault that she hated his guts. The man frustrated me to no end and Julia, even though she now lived many states away in Dallas, was still my number one go-to venting safe space when it came to the man. And she was right. I did need a talking to this morning.

Alba: I’m ready though. I’m doing this.

Julia typed a series of fire and fist-in-the-air emojis. Then a GIF from Hamilton with Lin Manuel Miranda mouthing “take my shot.”

Julia: You got this ma!

The three dots stayed on the screen for a beat and before the words popped up on my screen I knew what she was going to say.

Julia: And you’re still visiting right?

Though I knew it was coming, the question kicked up the anxious pounding in my chest. She wasn’t asking to confirm, she was asking because the four other times I’d promised to visit I’d canceled on her at the last minute.

I had a hard time leaving New York.

Between my three jobs and my family, I constantly felt like whenever I left the city I only came back to a string of fires to put out. But I had not taken a weekend off in a year and I was running on fumes. Also—and I really was ashamed of this part—Julia had been in Dallas for almost two years, and I had yet to visit. My friend had gone and made a whole-ass life for herself in Texas. New friends, new job, new man. She was happy, and though I was proud of her and so fucking happy that she was killing it down there, I felt like if I went and saw what she’d made, that I’d start comparing. That taking stock of what I still didn’t have would make me bitter.

But things would be different after today. I was finally doing the thing. I’d put this off for too damn long.

Julia: Am I going to need to get on a plane and force you to go on vacation, Alba Serena Duarte?

Maybe this bitch could read minds?

Alba: Damn, chill, Julia. I already have my ticket. I’m packed too. I’ll let him know today and fly to Dallas tomorrow. Be ready to pamper my ass like your place is the Ritz-Carlton.

Another GIF, this time of Michelle Obama clapping.

I was glad that she couldn’t see my face. Julia would make me in a second. Even typing those words let him know set off a cold sweat through my entire body. This was why I kept chickening out, because whenever I set out to do it, I’d go into a full panic. Fear that nothing would work out the way I wanted. That I’d fuck myself over by leaving a secure situation to strike out on my own. Fear that once I walked away from a steady—and generous—paycheck there would only be me to blame when everything went tits up. But I could not keep delaying things any longer. The future I wanted for myself was riding on me bossing up and doing this. I was not going to let fear fuck with my dreams anymore.

Julia: Ahhh! I can’t believe I get you for a whole week! We’re going to have so much fun. The Gotham Exiles are all dying to meet you. They all feel like they know you already.

I grinned at that as I forced myself to take deep, calming breaths. Julia’s friend group was a crew of ex–New Yorkers living in Dallas. Most of them worked for Sturm’s, the department store that owned the foundation Julia and her man worked for.

Alba: I’m excited!

I wasn’t lying. I’d FaceTimed enough with all of them over the last couple of years to feel like I knew them too and was genuinely looking forward to meeting them all in person.

Right then my phone—provided by my boss, so he could keep tabs on my ass whenever I was on the clock—pinged with my thirty-minute warning. Immediately my stomach did that flippy move it did whenever I was in proximity of the reason I was up and out in the streets of Queens before the sun was out. You’d think after three years I wouldn’t feel like ants were running a marathon over my skin, but you’d be wrong. It had to be some kind of trigger or an allergy. Yeah, it was mostly likely some kind of emotional allergic reaction. That had to be a thing.

Alba: Okay I have to go. TTYL

Julia: Next time we talk you will be free from the clutches of that big-ass Greek-Dominican nightmare you work for.

I winced, picturing the brooding, perfect face attached to those six feet and three inches of hard muscle encased in delicious caramel skin, and with determination pushed through the doors of my boss’s building.

I was ready. I would be fine. It was my time now.

Chapter One

Alba

Alba Serena Duarte doesn’t have bad days.

This is what I chanted to myself in a loop as I hustled across the lobby of a Long Island City high-rise, then shook my head like Marimar, my abuela’s poodle, after she gets a bath. What kind of asshole talks about herself in the third person, even if it’s in her own head?

That didn’t make my mantra any less true though. I didn’t have bad days, or more specifically I couldn’t afford them. Not while juggling three jobs and managing a seemingly endless stream of family demands. It wasn’t even that I was self-righteous and thought having bad days was beneath me; it was just my way of dealing with the fact that whenever I did have a bad day, I still had to work.

It’s a trick you learn when you can’t have something you really need. You start telling yourself you don’t want it anyway. You reframe, you pivot, you spin. I was really, really good at this particular form of mental gymnastics. Which was why I’d convinced myself I just didn’t have bad days. I allowed myself the occasional “we’ll try again in the morning” days. I could even do “let’s try to focus on the bright side” days...or my go-to “you’re a bad bitch and you can handle this” days.

But never ever a Bad Day.

Bad days implied taking breaks, time off to recharge, and my schedule did not allow for that, which meant I was exhausted. Wrung out down to the marrow of my bones. But hustle culture doesn’t come to a halt just because I’m feeling like a piece of chewed gum stuck to the pavement. That bitch keeps churning like a merry-go-round on steroids and you can either handle your business or get tossed on your ass, with your dreams right alongside you.

So I stayed on, even if some mornings I did it by the skin of my teeth. My dreams were worth losing a little—a lot of—sleep over, and what’s more I was slowly—very slowly—making them come true. Despite the utterly endless grind of the past three years, that thought brought a smile to my face. I was on the cusp of achieving a huge milestone. I just had to get through this morning—or more like the next few weeks, and I’d be there.

“You better hustle, Alba Duarte!” Nico the doorman called as I punched the code for the elevator. When I looked over my shoulder he lifted his wrist, tapping the brand-new Apple Watch he’d gotten from our boss last Christmas.

“I know! I’m going!” My feet responded to the playful urgency in his voice and I jogged in place, making him laugh.

“Dile a la Natasha que le mando saludos!”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head at his request to deliver his daily romantic overture to my coworker.

“I got no time to play middle-school love messages game with you, Nico.” I flashed him with deuces and stepped into the elevator. It was 5:30 a.m. and I was already five minutes behind schedule. Which wouldn’t be a big deal if I didn’t work for the most fastidious, demanding, punctuality obsessed man on planet earth.

Theodoro Anibal Ganas, heir to the Ganas real estate empire—and I meant that literally, the man’s father owned hundreds of apartments in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The senior Ganas was a former Greek nuclear physicist trained at MIT who instead of, as he put it, “making bombs for some dictator,” in the ’80s began buying condemned buildings and renovating them himself with the help of a friend. A decade later, Achilles Ganas was a bona fide mogul with dozens of properties. As his star was on the rise he met a lovely Dominican flight attendant while on a business trip to the DR. That relationship was not one of Achilles’s most successful ventures, but it did yield my pain-in-the-ass boss. You’d think me being Dominican would give some kind of favor with the man.

Well, you’d be wrong.

Theo Anibal Ganas did not give a fuck about our shared ancestry. Where I was a little militant about my Dominicaness, Theo barely acknowledged it. To be fair, he didn’t seem to care about being Greek either. Theo was...taciturn. Stoic. Contained. After years of working for him I could recite every detail about what the man did from the moment he woke up until 6:00 p.m. every evening, but I had no idea how he felt about anything.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly true. I knew he loved his little sister, Zoe. I knew his best friend was his stepmother—which was not as weird as it sounded since she was only like five years older than him. I also knew he was a generous and fair boss. But other than that, Theo Ganas was a mystery to me. A large and imposing, ruthlessly serious mystery that I wished I cared a lot less about deciphering.

And I had tried. I’d told myself it was part of the job. That being a good assistant meant you had to know your boss enough to anticipate his thoughts. So I’d tried to mine him for anything I could use to get a bead on the man who paid my salary. My efforts had not produced much. For fuck’s sake, it took six months for me to even realize he was half Dominican and that only happened because I brought some breakfast to the office—mashed plantains with fried cheese and salami, my ultimate comfort food. Natasha—his other assistant—recognized the DR staple and commented that Theo’s mother was Dominican. When I asked him why he hadn’t mentioned it, all excited that we had something in common, he looked down his infuriatingly straight nose at me and told me that not everyone had to act like a walking, talking ad for Dominicans in New York.

See? Asshole.

The annoying thing was that despite Theo being a broody prick to me at all times, everyone in the office loved him. It seemed that a charming, warm, funny Theo Anibal surfaced regularly, as long as I wasn’t around. Natasha had been working with the Ganas family since he was a teen and basically worshipped the ground he walked on. But I had never seen any evidence of this lovable version of Theo. What I regularly got was a scowling despot—no, that was not too harsh—who didn’t even deign to make eye contact with me.

That first Christmas after I started as his PA, when I still thought I was working for a sentient human, not an evil droid encased in an insanely buff skin suit, I naively left a bottle of my abuela’s ponche on his desk with a very festive red ribbon tied around the neck. I even attached a little sprig of artificial mistletoe with my glue gun. It was adorable and sure, I might’ve been trying to score some points, but that ponche is the fucking nectar of the gods. It is extremely sought-after in all of Corona, Queens. How was I supposed to know the only person with Caribbean blood running through their veins that didn’t rock with ponche was Theo?

I still squirmed remembering that morning when I watched my boss walk into his office, stand in front of his desk for a full minute then walk right back out with the tip of the bottle pinched between his two fingers like it was an active explosive. And because sometimes I was that dense I smiled, thinking he was coming to gush about the present, and blurted out, “Don’t try it on an empty stomach it’s got a lot of rum!”

The grin and thanks I thought were forthcoming did not happen. Instead he placed the ponche on my desk and without even bothering to look at me said, “I don’t accept gifts from my assistants,” then walked off.

Such a comemierda.

He won’t be your boss much longer, I reminded myself, trying to shake off the lingering mortification of that memory. But instead of relief at the thought of no longer having to deal with Theo Anibal looking right through me on a daily basis, that weird sensation like I’d swallowed a bunch of ice settled in my stomach again.

It had to be nerves. It made perfect sense to be a little nervous that the leap I was taking on my own was a huge one and losing the security of a job with full health benefits was understandably spooking me. It wasn’t like I’d miss him, that would be... Well, it didn’t matter what it was because I was delighted to be quitting this job.

It wasn’t even about Theo, really; being a PA had always been a temporary plan. I had a degree in interior design from the New School and a master of architecture from Columbia, which I would be paying for until I died. Making macchiatos for surly millionaires wasn’t what I was destined to do.

Hell, this job was supposed to be a six-month gig to help my mother through one of her many “money is tight” spells while I was in grad school. It was a one-year-tops situation, and here I was almost three years later, still getting yelled at for not getting the right biscotti for a man with a degree from MIT with access to the same food delivery apps I had. For over a year now I’d let my mother’s warnings that “decorating bedrooms for your friends isn’t a secure job” keep me from taking the leap. And it was true that a few hundred thousand followers on TikTok didn’t exactly warrant success for my business, but I’d never know if I didn’t try.

That thought kept me going as I ascended to the twenty-eighth floor of the Ganas Tower. Eyes closed, sucking in air through my nose and exhaling slowly out of my mouth for a few seconds, I pushed down the urge to talk myself out of it. As I neared my office I shut the door right in the face of the smug little devil perched on my shoulder whispering in my ear that the Duarte family could not afford to take one more risk. That I was going to fuck up and waste my savings. That no one in their right mind would pay me to renovate their house. That people might hit like or comment on TikTok, but they would never actually shell out thousands of dollars and entrust me with their entire homes. That decorating bedrooms in the theme of someone’s favorite book could never work as a viable business. That I would be back here in a few months begging for my job. I shut all of that out, swallowed every ounce of doubt and imagined it being crushed to dust in my gut. Hesitation was not part of the program today. I had to stick to the plan.

Finally launching my business, the only thing in my life that I was proud of: Bookish Boudoir.

While in grad school for fun I started doing book-themed budget bedroom makeovers for my friends. They’d give me a thousand bucks and I would turn their room into an homage to their favorite story. Julia—who honestly always had the best ideas—suggested I do before and after posts on Instagram. I tried it and it kind of blew up. I was a whiz with the sewing machine and knew every trick in the book when it came to DIY, and soon I started making custom designs for my clients. When word started getting around a bunch of other grad students wanted my makeovers. I even had people sliding into my DMs, asking to book me. Since then, I’d been steadily building it up.

But for the money to really be good, I needed to focus solely on BB. Which was hard while juggling three jobs. Whenever I wasn’t managing Theo’s life, or doing makeovers, I took on freelance work from architects, which left me barely enough time to eat, shower and sleep a few hours. Something had to give and for once I was going to do the thing that made me happy.

I took out my phone and scrolled until I found my latest makeover. A suite inspired by a wildly popular fantasy series. I had read the books and loved them and went all out on recreating my vision for the Night Court where the protagonists reigned. The post for it went viral and it had given me the last push to finally strike out on my own. As I read the positive comments, I began to feel calmer.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

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