My Maine Coon Murdered the Mistress. My Husband Got Life.

Nobody died. Her husband is doing twenty-five years. Her calligrapher will never work in Charleston again. The cat did it, and the cat has a chair at the best restaurant in town.

Tansy Satterwhite signs forty letters before breakfast, and there is a cat in every one of them.

Beauregard weighs twenty-four pounds, lies across whatever she is signing, and has not been moved in ten years. There is a hair of his in every signature she has ever put on paper. It started as a joke. It is now the only thing about her signature that is hers, and she has never told her husband, because in fifteen years her husband has never looked at a page she signed. He looks at the top, where the letterhead is. He looks at the bottom, where the money is.

Then a wire shows up in the board packet. Two hundred and ten thousand dollars out of the children's wing, to an account she has never heard of, opened in her name. The signature is perfect. The signature is clean. No hair. No paw.

She did not sign it. She would know. She had help.

Forty-one forged pages. Four hundred and thirty thousand dollars. A calligrapher who has lettered Tansy's name more times than Tansy has, a husband who wants his own name on the hospital wing her family paid for, and a trap built so well that every page points at the chair of the foundation. Which is her.

A cat hair is not evidence. The FBI says so, kindly. The forger has to be caught holding her own work, in a room, in front of people who can write it down. So Tansy builds the room: the naming ceremony, the mayor, the board, the press, and the loudest man in Charleston, who has been in love with her for a year and has said so across a full dining room every time she walks in.

Tuck Haddad fell first, out loud, in front of everyone. He will not be told the plan. He will give her the room, the table, the chair for the cat, and the kitchen, and he will not lower his voice for anyone, until the one night it matters, when he asks her quietly, once, so she knows he can.

A revenge romance with teeth, a he-fell-first slow burn with a man who does not do quiet, a mistress who taped the wrong evidence into her own portfolio, and a Maine Coon who has never cared whether this city likes him, which is the one thing this city cannot buy. Closed-door. HEA, no cliffhanger. No body. One very dead reputation.

A standalone in the world of Wives In Their Petty Era, the series where wronged wives quietly take a city apart. Read it cold; nothing here needs the other books.