Hard to Get Series

Shrimply irresistible…   Lola Quigley can't believe her good luck when she wins a spot on the Food Channel's popular Shop till you Drop. The show features amateur foodies competing to produce a prize-winning meal from staples commonly found in food banks, where people often unload their most unwanted pantry items. Having lived on a near poverty-level budget for a few dark years when her life imploded unexpectedly, Lola had grown to love the challenge of creating delicious meals with the cheapest ingredients she could find on the sale shelf of the grocery store, or—in a twist of irony—donated from her local food bank. She just has to win this: the prize money would help her launch the soup kitchen food truck she's dreamed of starting. It'll be her way of paying it forward after she managed to dig out of a financial hole she'd doubted she ever could escape. Levi Patton is pissed. He's stuck doing penance as a guest chef on an annoying cable reality TV show where overly enthusiastic wannabes try to outdo him with random undesirable ingredients. Will he ever get over the meteoric crash of his career after a food critic found the unmistakable tail of a rat floating atop his bouillabaisse at Levi's revered Washington, DC, restaurant? Convinced, but unable to prove, that a jealous sous chef sabotaged him, his name is now mud in the food world; he's drowning in the veritable toilet of the culinary industry: competing on Shop till you Drop. And he's totally screwed when he ends up pitted against the overly cheerful brunette with the tattoo of Popeye on her bicep, the very woman he'd left at the altar nearly a decade ago.

Go hard or go home… After losing her beloved neighbor Violet, Daphne Sweeney realizes her dream when Violet leaves her part ownership of the duplex she shared with her aged friend. Finally, after years of trying to scrape together the money for her own place, Daphne can stay put, establish some real roots, in her humble little home from Violet. Until she realizes Violet left the remaining ownership of the house to a very distant relative, Brady McGovern, who just so happens to be Daphne's college boyfriend who fled town the day after graduation, never to be heard from again. And Brady has touched down in town just long enough to unload the property and get back on the road again, just like the good old days.

Hard up…   Sunshine Ferguson had finally gotten her Zen on. After years of being an uptight staffer for a hotheaded senator, she'd been forced to switch careers, changed her name to something more cheerful and less evocative of the implosion from her last job, and became a yoga instructor. It was the furthest thing, career-wise, from what she'd been doing. She really needed to nourish her soul upon being fired when she got caught accidentally making out in a dark bar with a staffer of the candidate trying to take the senator's job. The loud-mouthed press secretary proved once again that men were never to be trusted, though at least his blabbering their secret finally forced her out of the job that had been toxic for a long time.  Life was finally good for Sunny. She was calm. She was imperturbable. Until the very man who blew up her career—and ultimately absconded with her job—shows up in her class, seeking to find his own nirvana.

Not such a cutie patootie...   Alyssa Heyward has held a powerful grudge against Josh "The Mad Tooter" Trumbull for the better part of her life. Not that obsessing over something that happened when you were a tween is a particularly helpful thing to do for your mental health. And not like she's dwelt on it forever. In fact, she hadn't considered it—or him—for a long, long time… Until he shows up at her door as the new general contractor set to do major renovations on her house. Which instantly resurrects all of those old feelings about the sleepover at her best friend's house when she ever-so-reluctantly agreed to partake in her first (and last) game of spin-the-bottle. When the creepiest boy in the Fourth grade spun, and the bottle pointed toward Alyssa, she thought her life was over indeed. And when she stood as far away from him in the dark storage closet instead of submitting to an unwanted kiss from the boy everyone knew had eaten a fly in the cafeteria and whose propensity for, um, breaking wind in all the wrong places (not to mention belching like a bullfrog) were the hallmark of his personality, she hoped she'd dodged a bullet. Until Josh Trumbull exited the closet and told everyone that instead of kissing him, Alyssa had emitted a noxious fume in the closed space.    Perhaps the high point of Josh Trumbull's prank-filled childhood happened at a spin-the-bottle party, when the girl he fostered a wicked crush on refused to grant him that one little kiss, and instead treated him like a pariah when they were sequestered in the dark confines of the kissing closet. Quick on his feet with a rejoinder, Josh popped out of the dark room and told all his buddies that Alyssa had pooted in there, killing all romantic notions of a first kiss.   He hadn't given this moment a second thought for the rest of his life. Until now. When he rings the doorbell of the woman whose home he's set to renovate and when she opens the door, her face falls, much like it did when that spinning bottle pointed straight at her nearly fifteen years earlier. Leaving him to wonder: does he have any chance of rebuilding a relationship with the woman who hates him most as he rebuilds her home?