Hot Water

She thought he was a plumber. He was anything but. Anna has spent her life choosing science over love. At forty-three, she’s a brilliant Princeton chemistry professor, a celebrated researcher, and an expert at keeping her heart safely out of the equation.

Then she meets Jacob on the tennis courts. He’s charming, persistent, infuriatingly attractive, and apparently, a plumber. Jacob asks Anna to dinner. She says no. He asks again. She says no again. After a lifetime of feeling awkward in her own skin, Anna has never let a man get close enough to discover what’s underneath.

Her friend Cathy intends to change that. Just as Anna begins to wonder if Jacob might be worth the risk, her carefully ordered life explodes. She wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the woman who once avoided romance is suddenly being photographed, interviewed, and whisked around the world with Jacob beside her. Only Jacob isn't a plumber. He’s a wealthy international businessman with a private jet, a French estate, a complicated family, and secrets Anna never saw coming.

And then Peter comes back, brilliant, British, and Anna’s first love, Peter has a way of making her question everything, including Jacob’s growing jealousy. Soon Anna and Jacob are racing between Princeton and London, Stockholm and Tokyo, scientific laboratories and a spectacular estate in Fontainebleau. There are motorcycles, private jets, family dramas, old flames, outrageous misunderstandings, and one very inconvenient problem: They’re falling in love. But love is easy compared with trust. As secrets surface and jealousy threatens to tear them apart, Anna must decide whether the man who turned her carefully controlled world upside down is also the man she can finally let into her heart.