From a young age, Cobie Galloway made a career of playing the girl-next-door on the silver screen. Only, she’s not a teenager anymore. Ready to challenge herself artistically and earn the part she’s always dreamed of, she’s forced to face the realization that in order to win the roles afforded to edgier actresses, she might first have to audition by playing someone edgier in her day-to-day life.
Pop star Lila Wilder built a multimedia empire by always having her finger on the pulse of what’s hot. However, as she struggles to produce her next smash hit record, she’s finding it hard to keep her name in the public eye, and a string of tumultuous relationships with Hollywood boy-toys no longer captivates anyone’s attention.
Both women tentatively agree to a headline-grabbing fauxmance, with two simple rules: Always stick to the script, and never forget that on the stage of public perception, nothing is real. Can two women find love in a world of carefully crafted illusions, or will a successful charade mean the potential for something more gets left on the cutting-room floor?
Simone and Loreto don’t have to like each other. They only need to work together, but the heat and the history around them and between them conspires to demand so much more.
When Simone Price lands in southern Spain, she has one job upon which the future of her entire career rests: She must convince a small, Spanish publishing house to sell their business to her much larger American corporation. The job should be easy, but many others have failed. Refusing to repeat their mistakes, she hires a guide, translator, and purveyor of Andalucían culture for the week leading up to her big meeting.
The plan seems simple enough until she meets Loreto Molina, and it quickly becomes apparent that Loreto knows more than her casual demeanor might suggest. The complications only escalate as the two set out on a scorching path through a region that shatters all expectations. As their time together stretches on, both women must confront not only their assumptions about each other, but also their own world views amidst a steamy landscape of temptation, power, purpose and raw attraction. Spain acts as both catalyst and conduit for unearthing desires long buried and threatening carefully planned futures.
As the stakes and emotions rise like the hot, unrelenting sun, Simone and Loreto fight to hold onto the ideals they hold dear, but what if the only way for either of them to truly win is to surrender?
Fencing prodigy Jess Kidman has always been ahead of her peers. At the age of thirteen she made the varsity team, won a state championship, came out, and fell head over heels in love with her team captain, Lauren Standish. After being gently rebuffed by the high school senior, young Jess vowed she would return for her some day when their age difference became irrelevant and her own accomplishments made her not merely an equal, but an Olympian. Ten years later, Jess makes good on her promise, but when she arrives back in Buffalo a few months before the big games, she’s intrigued to find that the woman she’s always dreamed of could also be exactly the coach she needs to win gold.
Lauren, however, isn’t the bubbly team captain she’d been at eighteen. After a stellar collegiate career of her own, circumstances forced her to put her dreams on the shelf and return to Buffalo. She’d made peace with a quiet life spent running a rust belt fencing club and coaching kids when Team USA’s hottest young fencer waltzes back into her life. As much as Lauren finds Jess’s confidence and athleticism alluring, she also sees the hotheaded superstar as a threat to the carefully controlled world rebuilt in the wake of the traumatic loss she is desperate to avoid reliving. Never one to turn her back on a friend in need, Lauren agrees to coach Jess on the condition that they focus only on the swordplay and not the sharp point of attraction threatening to sever the bonds of her professionalism.
The two women set to work preparing for the biggest event,but as tension mounts in the lead-up to the Olympic Games, the pressure and the passion building between them also grows, leaving both to wonder if Jess is trying to win the gold, or win the girl.
Mira Collins has her life together. She’s built a solid career as a financial planner, a comfortable home, and an uncomplicated and regimented routine…until her wayward sister, Vannah, shows up unexpectedly and drops a bomb on her orderly world. Ever dependable Mira reluctantly accepts temporary custody of her ten-year-old nephew, Ben, then quickly learns that not all responsibilities can be handled with a color-coded calendar system, and that being a substitute parent is terrifying. There are new skills, stressors, and emotions to contend with, many of which are simultaneously simplified and complicated by Ben’s beautiful young violin teacher.
Shelby Tanner is fresh out of grad school and eager to start her first job as an orchestra teacher, and although she believes the power of music will enrich her students’ lives, she still feels like she’s waiting for her own to start. Working harder than ever to make ends meet while struggling to find her feet, she quickly learns that not everything can be handled with a well-tuned instrument or a creative mindset, and that being an adult is terrifying. She’s desperate to feel confident and competent, but the world keeps tripping her up. Case in point, her growing attraction to the guardian of her most gifted young musician.
Drawn together by their changing circumstances and their mutual affection for Ben, Shelby and Mira learn to lean on each other despite their differences in age, personality, and lifestyle, until Vannah’s reappearance threatens to upend everyone’s lives all over again. Is attraction enough to sustain opposites without the commonality of Ben between them, or will the beautiful music they’ve created together fade into silence?
