Ani Winthrop has spent the last ten years trying to forget what it meant to be Ani Mackenzie, the girl who had to say good-bye to her childhood love Sebastian O’Reilly when she was just sixteen. She married a wonderful man, had a beautiful daughter with him, and opened up her own bakery, The Sweet Spot. But when Sebastian walks into her bakery after fifteen years apart, she cannot ignore that he is the only one who could ever truly find her sweet spot.
Sebastian has returned to Boston now, no longer a boy, a man with a feral intensity and a hard muscled body tattooed with the story of his years away from Ani. He has returned to claim the love of his life, only to find that Ani is a wife and mother to another man’s child.
Now Ani has to choose between the love that she has for her husband Jordan, a handsome and successful pediatric neurosurgeon, and the love for Sebastian that she has never been able to let go of.
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fingers and sliding it into Ani’s mouth. Ani sucked Sebastian’s finger into her mouth and licked the dripping juices as he fed her.
Ani whispered, twisting around and lifting herself up onto the table until she was sitting in front of Sebastian with her legs in his lap.
across Ani’s bottom lip as he slipped his thumb under her teeth, rubbing the
taste of curry on the roof of her mouth.
moaned, throwing her head back as Sebastian continued to drip sauce onto her
lips.
onto the table.
You,” Ani moaned in reply, reaching for Sebastian and pulling him toward her.
him.
Ani breathed, reaching forward and pulling Sebastian out of his jeans.
whispered, wrapping his hands around Ani’s as she stroked him. I imagined you tasting me.” Sebastian rubbed his fingers across the tip of himself and wet them with the beads of pre-come that oozed out. “I imagined this,” Sebastian murmured, bringing his sticky fingers up to Ani’s mouth and rubbing them against her lips.
bringing her face down to run her tongue across the tip of Sebastian’s leaking cock. “But you know what I dreamed of the most?” Sebastian moaned as Ani took him in her mouth.
spreading her legs open as he peeled off her jeans. “I yearned to sink myself inside you.” He slid a finger into Ani, stretching her open for him.
finger out of Ani and thrusting inside her with a groan. “You were so tight and wet, so sweet.” He traced the hickeys down Ani’s body with his tongue. “You smelled like the sea,” Ani whispered back.
I got my first taste of romance novels tucked away in the back of Papyrus, a little bookstore near Columbia University in Manhattan, when I was eleven years old. They had a children’s section, but it was downstairs in the basement, accessed by a separate street entrance, and they always closed it before we got there.
My father liked to take me and my brothers to bookstores late at night, after spending at least an hour lingering over black coffee and poppy seed cookies at The Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue and we never made it over to Papyrus before ten p.m.
Out of boredom, trapped in the dusty aisles of Papyrus late at night, I started browsing through all the old used books. I wasn’t too interested in the textbook sections that catered to the Columbia students, but
I did fall in love with the paperback romance novels. The first one that I read was an epic 500-page historical love story set during the War of 1812. I was drawn in instantly, and I fell in love with romance novels after that. My oldest and dearest friend Barbara’s older sister, Audrey, lent me my second romance novel, a tattered paperback that reminded me of a steamier version of the movie Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. After that, I could always be found in the romance section of B. Dalton Books,
devouring steamy historical romance novels by Catherine Coulter and Dorothy Garlock.
I then proceeded to write my own romance series, which I thought was fabulous, but since I was only twelve and had an almost non-existent love life to base it on, it probably wasn’t actually that exciting.
Over the years, I detoured away from the standard romance novels as I delved into classic literature as an English major in college at Drew University, and I fell in love with the classics: Jane Austin, George Elliot,
The Bronte Sisters, Hardy, and Hawthorne. In my personal reading, I delved into Gail Tsukiyama, Dorothy Allison, Kathryn Harrison, Julia Alvarez, Anita Shreve and many others. I devoured memoirs by Alexandra Fuller, Adeline Yen Mah and Helen Fremont. I went through a Patricia Cornwell phase and even considered
becoming a mortician, earning the nickname Morticia from my husband’s high school buddy Jeremy. But through it all, the constant theme that attracted me to everything that I read was romance, and in the end, I found myself circling back and falling in love with the good old romance novel again.
Upon my return to my old love, the romance novel, I fell in love with Julie Garwood and read every historical romance that she wrote at least five times. Then I discovered Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books and tore through them, sulking and grumbling as I waited for each new book in the series to come out.
During this process of abandoning the romance novel and finally returning to it, I graduated college, married a wonderful man and spent the next twelve years having five children, which kept me a little busy and distracted me from the one thing that I love more than reading romance novels, writing them.
So armed with a little more history in the love department than I had at twelve, I decided to dive back in and write The Sweet Spot. I had no idea initially that it was going to be the first book in my Boston Harbor
Romance series, but as I was writing it, I realized that I didn’t want the story to end, and that so many of the characters in the book had stories that needed to be told.
Whenever I finish reading a great romance, it is always bittersweet because I miss the characters that I have fallen in love with. The wonderful thing about a series is that you never have to say good-bye.
Reading Renee 