Fancy Beasts: A Gilded Age American Prizefighting Romance (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798258912268)

He bought her father's debt. He expected a wife. He never imagined she would become the fighter.

Hell's Kitchen, 1901.

Eighteen-year-old Eudora Cheek has spent her life surviving a violent father and the poverty that keeps her trapped beneath his roof. When his gambling debts finally come due, she expects his enemies to take the butcher shop.

Instead, undefeated heavyweight champion Lone Dearing makes him an offer.

The debt disappears. Eudora becomes Lone's wife.

Known in the ring as the Wolf, Lone is feared for his fists, his temper, and the relentless hunger that carried him from abandonment to national fame. He has watched Eudora from across the street for months, and now that he possesses the means to claim her, he has no intention of letting her go.

Eudora knows better than to mistake ownership for rescue.

Their marriage begins as another cage, furnished with money, beautiful clothes, and a husband accustomed to winning everything he wants. But as Eudora follows Lone through the brutal world of American prizefighting, she discovers the damaged man beneath the champion-and a violence within herself that may be better suited to the ring than the parlor.

Then one fatal fight destroys the life they have built.

Betrayal sends Eudora back to New York alone, where she enters Lone's abandoned gym and begins training in secret. She has spent her life absorbing blows from men who believed she could not strike back.

Now she intends to prove them wrong.

To earn another place beside her, Lone must do something far harder than defeat an opponent: surrender the woman he tried to possess and stand in the corner of the fighter she has chosen to become.

Fancy Beasts is an explicit dark historical romance featuring a Gilded Age heavyweight champion, a coerced marriage, an age gap, organized crime, betrayal, female prizefighting, a possessive antihero, and a hard-won HEA.