TOOLS OF ENGAGEMENT

A woman desperate to prove her value to her family’s house-flipping business falls in love with her foreman.

Bethany Castle used to embrace her perfectionist tendencies, but lately, those urges are starting to control her. Even a job she used to love—staging homes for her family’s Long Island construction business—has become stultifying and unsatisfying. Bethany dreams of leading her own project; she knows she's capable of more than selecting paint colors and arranging furniture. When her brother responds to her dream with derision, Bethany furiously quits the business. She starts her own project and hires handsome newcomer Wes Daniels as her foreman. Wes is a recent transplant from San Antonio. When his sister’s marriage disintegrated a few months earlier, she asked him to care for her 5-year-old daughter so she could get her head together. Wes has taken a job working construction, awed and bewildered at how, at 23, he’s settled down into sudden respectability and what feels a lot like fatherhood. Wes thinks his razor-sharp banter with Bethany is flirtation while Bethany is horrified at her wild attraction to a man seven years her junior. Catching wind of the Castle family feud, a TV producer persuades Bethany and her brother to appear on a reality TV show that will judge which one of them flips their house most successfully. Although Bailey creates likable characters and writes snappy dialogue, the subplots about the TV show and Wes’ guardianship of his niece interferes with Bethany and Wes’ emotional development as partners and lovers. The two are conquering their own demons on separate journeys, and their unevenly paced romance only flares to life in the final third of the book.

A romance between charming characters is sidelined by weighty subplots.