Danielle L. Jensen

The Bridge Kingdom sends an assassin-trained princess into a political marriage with instructions to find and betray her new husband's weakness.

Jensen commits properly to the espionage, so Lara's competence is real and her deception has consequences the romance has to carry rather than dissolve. The Malediction trilogy came earlier, set in a mountain city of trapped fae.

She writes at the harder end of romantic fantasy, where the political stakes do not evaporate once the couple works things out.