Practice Makes Perfect

Annie Walker runs the flower shop in Rome, Kentucky, and she likes her quiet life. Her love life is another matter. Dating options in a small town are thin, and her latest date has just called her boring.

She decides she needs lessons in flirting and settles on a tutor straight away: Will Griffin, a tattooed bodyguard who is in town to protect Amelia Rose before her wedding to Annie's brother, Noah. Will wants no attachments, and certainly none with the sweetest person in town. He still cannot bring himself to turn her down.

So the two start a run of practice dates that are meant to be purely educational. Will begins to see that Annie is a good deal more than her reputation suggests. Annie, for her part, starts to suspect that the man she has been imagining may not match the one actually coaching her.

This is a small-town romantic comedy built on friends-to-lovers tension, with plenty of banter and a warm, light tone. It is the second book in the When in Rome series by Sarah Adams. The setup is a fake-lesson pretext with a protective, reluctant hero and a heroine who is underestimated by the people around her.