Tempt

A wedding planner takes on a job that goes sideways in a way she never planned. A week before the rehearsal dinner, she spends a night in a Manhattan hotel with a bearded stranger who steps in when a creep corners her at the bar. She goes up to his room, and she assumes that is the end of it.

Then the stranger turns up at the rehearsal dinner, introduced as the father of the groom. The groom is her ex. The man is Zach, a former Navy SEAL, and the pull between them in New York has not faded.

In public they act like strangers. In private they cannot stay apart. Zach only recently learned he has a son, and he wants to earn that son's trust and respect. She wants a man ready to start a family, and Zach has told her plainly he is not that man. He is fifteen years older, newly divorced and based on the other side of the country.

This is a contemporary romance told in the first person by the heroine, with an open-door, steamy tone and a forbidden-relationship dynamic. It is also a story with a light, teasing voice. The tension comes from a situation with no easy way out, and the two keep breaking every line they draw.