Birthday Girl

On the night of her nineteenth birthday, Jordan Hadley is evicted from the apartment she shares with her boyfriend, Cole. A chance encounter at a late-night screening leads her to Pike Lawson — kind, steady, and, it turns out, Cole's father. When the young couple has nowhere to go, Pike offers them a place to stay for the summer in exchange for help around the house.

What begins as a practical arrangement grows complicated. As Cole drifts and disappoints, Jordan and Pike find in each other an understanding neither expected, and an attraction that neither is supposed to feel. Pike, nearly twice her age, wrestles with what pursuing it would cost them both.

Penelope Douglas's Birthday Girl is a steamy, emotionally charged age-gap romance about two people building something real out of an impossible situation — and about wanting a life larger than the one you were handed.