Work-Love Balance:
WORK-LOVE BALANCE is a 70k contemporary MM office romance. It’s hot enough you’ll want to make sure the air conditioning is on in your cubicle, and heartfelt enough you’ll want to smack both characters before the end. HEA guaranteed!
Book Synopsis:
The customer always comes first, but IT consultant Brady Jansen loves to hate Nash O’Hara. Except the fine line between hate and attraction means sometimes Brady can’t help it when he crosses the boundary between professional and personal.
Recently divorced, workaholic Nash knows he’s hard to please. When the smart-mouthed IT consultant he depends on to keep his office running offers a no-commitment hookup, it seems like exactly what he and Brady both need to get through a busy summer at work. No one has to know about their arrangement.
But the more time they spend together, the more secrets they have to keep from the people around them—and from each other. The lies are piling up, until it’s hard to tell who’s fooling whom. If Brady and Nash want to find the balance between work and love, a little honesty will go a long way.
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Holy fuck. It’s Nash. Nash is in my yoga class.
Hot yoga is my Saturday morning retreat. Technically, we’re on call 24/7. No one told me when I started my own business that I’d basically be sleeping with my cell phone. But Saturday mornings are off-limits. Ramona gets to carry the nuclear football phone—the after-hours phone that never leaves our side—on Saturdays while I run errands and maybe have lunch with my dad, then I get it back for the rest of the week.
I started hot yoga about a year ago, when the anxiety dreams—the ones where clients never pay their bills, or demand laptops that don’t exist, or refuse to admit that I’ve already delivered the same phone twice—became so chronic I was only getting a couple hours of sleep a night. These Saturday morning sessions are a chance to wipe the slate clean and let my body and brain go blank. If I squeeze in a little meditation a few other times a week, I can get four or five hours of sleep most nights, instead of two or three.
Hot yoga is a place for me to forget about work, and now I’m staring down the client I most want to avoid.
I noticed him, of course. It’s the dead of summer, so only the really regular people are showing up for classes, while everyone else is at the cottage or chasing their kids around. The new guy on the mat in front of me stood out, particularly because he was dressed for a game of pickup basketball and only brought a tiny Captain America bottle for water. Still, he’s fit, with nice calves and a great ass. The hair on the back of his head is dark brown, with flecks of silver in it.
I’ve been into older guys lately. I mean, in theory I’ve been into older guys. My schedule hasn’t really set itself up for any kind of love life. But I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m working so much, while most guys my age are still navigating first jobs, or talking about going back to grad school, or still living in their parents’ house while they save up for a mortgage. And I’ve got employees—well, I’ve got Ramona—and clients, and I may never be able to afford a mortgage, because right now I’m just trying to get clients to pay me in a timely manner. I don’t have much in common with the other twenty-somethings I know.
So, maybe, instead of focusing on my breathing and finding the length in the pose, I think about the guy in front of me. About those strong calves and the swell of his ass as he stretches one leg out behind him. His hair is cut short as it fades to his nape, and I picture the feeling of it if I were to brush my fingers along it.
And then he turns around, and it’s motherfucking Nash O’Hara, and all my peace and mindfulness dissolves into a puddle of sweat.
I almost run out of the room, except that won’t be obvious at all, will it? The way his eyes widen and his nostrils flare shows he’s just as surprised to see me. His face is flushed, and his hair is matted down onto his forehead. His scruffy U of T T-shirt is mottled with sweat, and now I’m thinking about his chest and whether he might be hairy and—oh God—whether that chest hair might be a little silvery too.
Before I can smile or say hi, or apologize for objectifying him on the phone yesterday—oh my God, was that only yesterday? The universe is fucking with me—Fiona, the instructor, sends us into a tree pose that has him turning back toward the front.
He’s strong. His foot is up in the crease of his groin—don’t think about his groin, don’t think about his groin—and he doesn’t even wobble. The line of his spine is straight, accentuated by the way his shirt is sticking to him. His left leg, planted on the floor, is a solid pillar of muscle that would make my throat dry if it weren’t already parched from the heat in the room.
My concentration is shot. No matter how many times I try to find the balance point, I’m hopping around on my mat like a pogo stick. It’s a relief when Fiona lets us out of the pose, except then she sends us into another sequence of standing warrior poses, and Nash seems to flow through them like water. His whole body melts from one posture to the next, and I don’t know if I’m centered or grounded, or even still on this planet, because all I can do is watch the way his body moves and stretches, highlighting the tension in his legs or the veins in his forearms.
Fiona approaches him and gives him a smile. “Can I make a small correction?” she asks. He nods a little, so she gently puts her hands on his hips, and I watch, mesmerized, as she gives them a soft push, turning him more fully into the pose. And I can’t help myself when I think about my hands on his hips, turning him the way I want to, fitting him just so, so that his muscles are straining as he sinks into—
I’m hard. Holy shit, I’m wearing stretchy shorts and a tank that leaves more of my body open than covered, and now I have a motherfucking erection in the middle of hot yoga and—
I drop to my knees so fast that pain radiates up my shins. Abandoned marionettes have more grace than me right now as I curl in on myself, trying to hide my raging hard-on while wearing next to nothing.
A hand settles on my back, and I flinch, but it’s Fiona’s voice that says “Brady, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say hoarsely. “Just a foot cramp.” I curl my toes under my feet as if I might be stretching them out.
She rubs a little circle on my damp shirt. “Okay. Stay in child’s pose if you need to. And remember to hydrate. Cramping is a sign of dehydration.”
Allison Temple has been a writer since the second grade, when she wrote a short story about a girl and her horse. Her grandmother typed it out for her and said she’s never seen so many quotation marks from a seven-year-old before. Allison took that as a challenge and has gone on to try to break her previous record in all her subsequent works.
Allison lives in Toronto with her very patient husband and the world’s neediest cat. She splits her free time between writing, community theater stage management, and traveling anywhere that has good wine. Tragically, this leaves no time to clean her house.
Author links:
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Enter the giveaway by following @allisontemplebooks, and comment on any tour host photo using #WorkLoveBalanceTour. There will one winner of a paperback copy of this new release. Open Internationally.