Book Excerpt

My phone buzzes in my shorts pocket. I ignore it, thinking it’s a text, but then it buzzes again. I look down and see my father’s name lighting up the screen. Groaning, I answer. 

“Emilia.” His voice is calm, clipped. Not cold, just clean, like everything else he controls. He says my name like punctuation. 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Your mother asked me to check on the brunch.” 

She didn’t want to ask herself. She never does. She strategically delegates through him, like always. “It’s done,” I say. “Final headcount is confirmed. Catering’s squared. My remarks are short and already vetted.” There’s a pause, the sound of him moving paper in the background, or maybe pouring a drink. I can’t tell. He’s always multitasking, even when he speaks like everything is a priority. 

“She wants it to go smoothly.” 

It will. He knows that. He wouldn’t have called if he didn’t already trust it was handled. 

“There’s something else,” my father says right as I think we’re done, his voice flat and clipped in the way he reserves for things that aren’t up for discussion. “I’ve arranged a meeting with Nikolai and his father next week at the Four Seasons. I’d like you to be there. We have some important things to discuss.” 

– Excerpted from The Arrangement by S.D. Lettie, Independent, 2025. Reprinted with permission.

Interview with the Author

Can you share a story about what brought you to this particular career path (becoming an author)?

I’ve been an avid reader for as long as I can remember. In elementary school, the longest book I tackled was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, and after that I devoured the Harry Potter series and never really looked back. Every summer, my grandma would take me to Barnes & Noble and let me pick out a few books for the week I spent with her. What she didn’t realize was that I was a fast reader and could easily finish one or two books in a single day.

My love for writing started in middle school, thanks to my seventh-grade Language Arts teacher who had us write short stories in our composition notebooks as a warm-up every day. From there, I was constantly writing – on Word documents, in spiral notebooks, anywhere I could. Most of those early stories were Harry Potter fan fiction, so they never saw the light of day.

Then life happened. Kids, a career in B2B marketing, responsibilities. I actually stopped reading altogether until 2020, when the world was forced to slow down. Over the next few years, I fell back into reading hard – sometimes 300 to 400 books a year on my Kindle. I started with lighter romance authors like Tessa Bailey and Meghan Quinn, before eventually drifting into darker romance with writers like Rina Kent, J. Bree, and Eva Ashwood.

When I lost my job at the beginning of 2025, I knew it was my chance to finally write the story that had been living rent-free in my head for years. I had so many unfinished drafts and half-formed ideas, and this time, I committed to finishing one. And the rest is history.

Your latest book, The Arrangement, centers around a forced engagement and is a dark, slow-burn story of buried truths, political corruption, and a connection that pulls two damaged people toward a collision neither may survive unscathed. How did you come up with this very unique idea?

I really credit the inspiration for The Arrangement to two things:

First, mafia romance. As much as I love a golden-retriever MMC, there’s something about a morally gray man that just hits differently. The kind who’s dangerous, loyal to a fault, and would burn the world down for the woman he chooses. I knew from the start that my male character needed to live in that gray space.

Second, my love for espionage movies and TV shows. I’m fascinated by secrets, especially the ones buried inside politics and government. There’s something thrilling about uncovering what’s hidden beneath polished speeches and public images, and honestly, it feels closer to reality than people like to admit.

Blending those two worlds – organized crime and political power – felt natural. Once I put them together, the story pretty much took on a life of its own.

Can you tell us more about the main character in your book?

The book really centers around two characters: Emilia Langford and Nikolai Volkov.

Emilia is polished, overly analytical, sarcastic, and charming – the perfect political daughter on the surface. She’s spent her entire life playing a role, and in that way, she’s incredibly relatable. Not everything is as perfect as it looks, and Emilia represents that disconnect between appearance and reality better than anyone.

Nikolai, on the other hand, is our main male character and very much the morally gray counterpart. He’s intense, dangerous, and undeniably attractive – the kind of man who looks like he could kill you and probably has. While readers don’t get much of his POV in book one, the moments they do get are powerful. He’s calculated, loyal, and shaped by the world of organized crime in a way that makes him impossible to ignore.

Who are the other main characters?

Thalia is hands down my favorite character in this world. She’s the backbone of the story and wears way too many hats – Emilia’s ride-or-die, her unofficial therapist, the little voice on her shoulder, and the one person who will always say what everyone else is thinking. She’s blunt, unfiltered, and completely unapologetic about it.

Honestly, she became so fun to write that it only made sense to give her her own book. Some characters refuse to stay in the background, and Thalia is very much one of them.

What’s the very first line of your book? 

It opens with: “The ballroom is unbearably warm. It always is.”

What’s the main reason someone should really read your book?

There are a few reasons someone should pick up The Arrangement.

First, it’s part of an ongoing world. While this duet focuses on Emilia and Nikolai, their story isn’t the end – other characters step forward, and the world keeps expanding. Second, it’s a true slow burn. If you like stories that take their time building tension before everything finally collides, this book is for you. And finally, it’s grounded. It’s still fiction, but it feels real. Readers can get lost in the story while still recognizing the emotions, dynamics, and pressure the characters are under.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I’d want to start a movement focused on making books easier to access for everyone. Reading is one of the few ways people can escape, learn, and decompress without putting themselves at risk, but it’s still treated like a luxury. Libraries are important, but they don’t always have what people want or need.

I’d love to see more community-based book sharing, things like local swaps, little free libraries, school programs, and other low-barrier ways to get books into people’s hands. The goal would be to make reading feel accessible and normal, not expensive or exclusive.

About the Author

Before she ever had “author” next to her name, S.D. Lettie
was—and still is—an avid reader first; the kind who would finish a book
in a day and beg her parents to take her back to the bookstore. Reading
started as a hobby and, as she got older, became her source of
entertainment, escape, and comfort. Over the years, she found herself
wanting to write the kind of worlds readers could get excited about—a
world that could grow into a fandom of its own. 

Today, Lettie writes slow-burn
romances—stories about characters who are imperfectly perfect, the hard
moments that shape them, and the plot twists that leave readers reeling.
Outside her writing life, she’s a wife and mom of two, roles that
influence both her time and perspective. She’s also a dedicated soccer
fan, the kind who will plan her day around a match and openly admit
she’ll yell at the TV when things get heated.

Through all of it, her goal as an author is simple: she wants her characters to stay with readers long after the book ends. 

Her latest book is the new adult romantic suspense, The Arrangement (Bancroft University Chronicles Book 1).

Visit her website at www.sdlettieauthor.com. Connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, BookBub and Goodreads.