Marlowe Penn is forty-four years old. Widowed three years. CEO of the luxury hotel chain her father built from three Mayfair townhouses in 1984. She has not slept through a night since her husband died on the M25. She has not been touched in eighteen months. She has been chosen because she is useful for so long she has stopped noticing.

Cassidy Hale is twenty-eight. Scottish. Six-foot-one. New bartender at her flagship in Mayfair. He pours her an old fashioned on a Tuesday in October and calls her Mrs Penn. He looks at her the way a man looks at a woman he has been told to keep alive.

Because he has been.

Cassidy is former MI6. The Russian principal her CFO is preparing to expose has paid eight hundred thousand euros to put a bullet in her in six weeks. The man at her bar is the only thing standing between her and that bullet.

He has not been hired to want her.

She is going to find out he wants her anyway.

She is going to choose him anyway.

HALE is a slow-burn dark contemporary romance about a forty-four-year-old hotel CEO and the twenty-eight-year-old Scottish bartender who is not what he says he is. About the difference between being chosen because you are useful and being chosen because you are wanted. About what a woman discovers when she finally lets someone see her without the lights on.

Heat level 5. Standalone with full HEA. Book one of The Penn Group. Trigger warnings inside the book.