Beautiful

Pippa Bay Cox, a free-spirited Englishwoman, leaves London after learning her boyfriend cheated on her. She flies to the United States to clear her head, where friends have a fortnight of wine tasting planned up the East Coast, and she signs up.

Jensen Bergstrom is a lawyer who lives for work. His sister Hanna talks him into coming along. On the tour he is thrown together with Pippa, whom he met once before, on the plane over, in an exchange neither of them can forget for its awkwardness.

Jensen is careful and self-contained, and Pippa's open, warm charm steadily wears down his guard. Both of them treat the pairing as a holiday fling with an end date. As the fortnight runs out, it gets harder to let go, and their homes sit on opposite sides of an ocean.

This is the fifth and last book in the Beautiful Bastard series, published by Gallery Books on 4 October 2016. The tour brings together the whole cast of earlier books, so it reads partly as a reunion. The point of view alternates between Pippa and Jensen.

It is adult contemporary romance, explicit and comic in tone. Epilogues at the close check in on every couple from the earlier books, while the question that drives the story is whether a two-week fling can survive the flight home.