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Killing her before the book opened should have made this easier.

It did not.

I didn’t want Beau available in the clean, convenient way widowers sometimes are in romance. Yolanda is everywhere. In his house. In his daughter. In the habits of a man who spent twenty-five years considering another person before himself. He can’t pack her into a box, cry at the appropriate time, then move on once the right woman arrives.

He loves her. He misses her. He’s also lonely, horny, alive, and furious with himself for being all three.

Then Elodie walks into his classroom.

Elodie took longer for me to understand. At first, I knew what she looked like because I knew what Beau would notice. The freckles. The wide mouth. The soft stomach. Thick thighs. Breasts most women in his world would have paid a plastic surgeon to double. She’s nothing like the hard, polished women he has spent decades around, and his reaction to her is immediate, physical, and deeply inconvenient.

Of course, she had to become much more than the body driving him out of his mind.

Elodie has spent years making herself easy for other people. Her mother is dying, her boyfriend leaves, and she keeps handing everyone the cheerful, capable version of herself until they stop asking whether she’s okay. She’s funny because she’s smart. She also uses humor to move people along before they look too closely. She gets mouthy when she feels exposed. She can be prickly. She’s young enough to make some spectacularly bad choices and strong enough to survive them.

Beau sees the parts she works so hard to hide.

I suspect this is where he really falls for her. The physical attraction gets his attention. Elodie refusing to perform for him keeps it.

She has no idea who he is when they meet. Imagine being Beau Bixby after decades of people laughing too hard at your jokes, agreeing with everything you say, and treating your attention as a prize. Then this young woman wanders into your class late, talks to you like a regular person, challenges you, makes you laugh, and doesn’t care how many records you sold before she was born.

She doesn’t need anything from the famous version of him.

She likes the man who listens to her. The one who notices when she’s lying about being fine. The one who understands what it means to love a fiercely independent woman through the slow indignities of dying.

They recognize something in each other before either knows what to call it.

Caregiving can reduce two lives to medication schedules, crushed pills, half-eaten meals, and figuring out how to help someone to the bathroom without taking the last of their dignity. Then the person dies, and all those tasks disappear at once. You’re left with too much time and an inventory of every moment you might have handled better.

Beau and Elodie both know this. They can sit beside each other without having to explain what they’ve been through.

The story begins in such a painful place, yet writing it was ridiculously fun.

A lot of this came from Beau. He’s spent twenty-five years faithful to a woman he adored. Once he admits he wants Elodie, all those years of self-control begin to crack in some entertaining places. He tries to be respectful. He tries to be responsible.

Meanwhile, he’s picturing her mouth around his cock.

Elodie isn’t much better. She may not recognize the rock star, but she has eyes. Beau is gorgeous, kind, attentive, and built like a man who knows what to do with his clothes off. She wants him. No blushing euphemisms. No pretending the attraction means less because he’s older.

Once they finally give in, I let them have fun.

A lot of fun.

The sex became important for reasons beyond how hot they are together. Beau looks at Elodie’s body with a level of enthusiasm she has never experienced. He loves every soft part she has spent years trying to minimize. He doesn’t deliver a speech about how beautiful she is. She catches him staring at her pussy in a mirror and sees the truth on his face.

Far more effective.

Elodie gives something back to him too. She wants the body he has now. The silver in his hair. The lines around his mouth. The experience. The size of him. Every part Beau has quietly filed under aging becomes something she can’t keep her hands off.

He makes her feel desirable. She makes him feel alive.

This could have become a very heavy book. A dying mother. A dead wife. Two people hollowed out by caregiving. A daughter watching her father fall for a woman close to her own age. Plenty of grief to go around.

Somehow, Beau and Elodie kept pulling me toward joy. They flirt. They fight. They make terrible decisions and have spectacular sex. She teases him about his age. He worries everyone sees him as an ancient predator while Elodie is busy wondering how fast she can get his jeans open.

I had so much fun writing them. More than I expected, considering I started the book by killing a woman I ended up loving.

This may also be the friskiest book I’ve written, which feels appropriate. Beau has spent a long time behaving himself.