Coming in 2026.

BLURB

Some perimeters were never meant to hold.

Beth Ghattas is 46 years old and has everything money can buy—except a life that feels like her own.

Two years after walking away from the Seattle tech empire she quietly co‑built with her cheating ex-husband, the Ice Queen has reengineered herself as a writer and vanished into a six‑month sabbatical in Atlanta. On paper, it’s the perfect Second Act: a palatial Buckhead estate, three completed manuscripts awaiting edits, and a loyal bodyguard, Matthew, who maintains the perimeter.

But as the Georgia heat rises, the wall between client and protector begins to melt. Matthew is a man of protocol and cold restraint, yet beneath his clinical mask lies a simmering intensity that Beth can’t stop testing and that Matthew is finding increasingly difficult to ignore.

Outside the gates, the city hums with a different kind of risk and temptation. In dive bars and grimy back rooms, Beth falls into a web of sensual entanglements: Raed, the soulful younger musician who plays his guitar like a confession; William, the polished English developer with impeccable manners and a dangerous blind spot; and Bennett “Dirty Harry” Harryman, a legendary, volatile guitarist whose chaos feels like oxygen.

But then one devastating loss strips away everything Beth thought she’d rebuilt, and forces her to confront the one entanglement she’s been most carefully avoiding. As lust and old ghosts collide, she realizes that the most difficult revisions aren’t on the page. To claim her slightly reckless Second Act, she must decide what—and who—is worth breaking the rules for.

For readers who loved The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo but wanted her to have better sex.

This is not a typical contemporary romance or even a bodyguard romance, so suspend those expectations. It is spicy romantic women’s fiction, with a slow burn, banter, big big feels, and a bittersweet happy-for-now ending.