Her Best Friend's Dad: A Forbidden Age Gap Romance

By Lena Cahill

I told a stranger on a Lake Michigan breakwall that my best friend's dad sounded like a man who'd send a fruit basket to his own funeral.
At eight the next morning, the stranger was standing in the family kitchen, holding the bread knife.

Age gap: he's 47, she's 31Her best friend's dad, and the father of the brideStrangers on a pier first, then the revealForced proximity: she's living over his boathouseSecret relationship with a deadlineSilver fox billionaire who would rather sand a boat by handHe falls firstHe grovels, to her faceSmall lake town on Lake MichiganNo cheating, no other woman, no silly misunderstandingsGuaranteed happily ever after

MARGO

I'm thirty-one. I've done a hundred and forty weddings and I've never lost one. I'm the person you call when the wedding is on fire.

This one I'd walk into fire for anyway. It's Sadie's: my best friend, and the only person, she says, who's never lied to her. A hundred and sixty guests, a sailcloth tent on her family's lawn, a boat shuttle across the lake, and a groom's mother with a conduct clause in my contract and twelve weddings to send my way next year if I pull this off. I have a hundred-and-eighty-thousand-dollar business loan. I did the math.

What I didn't put on any list: the man sanding a mahogany boat by hand at midnight in the boat shop on the channel, who gave me terrible coffee and his grandfather's flannel and talked with me on the breakwall until one in the morning, with neither of us saying a name.

Now I'm living in the apartment over his boathouse, sixty yards from his back porch, and the wedding is forty-eight days away.

Callum Vos is forty-seven, gray at the temples, with forearms I think about against my will, and he finishes every stroke he starts.

He's also the father of the bride.

And I have one rule. I don't do secrets. Not anymore. Not for anybody.

CALLUM

I knew who she was the moment she said a house on the North Shore. I let her keep talking. I did not want the hour to be over.

My daughter did not speak to me for eight years. I sent flowers and a check to her graduation and told myself it was the same as being there. Now she is getting married on my lawn, and she has given me the terms: show up for all of it, or don't show up for any of it.

Her best friend is planning the wedding. Sadie says Margo is the only person who has never lied to her.

So I drew a line the first morning. She is Sadie's best friend. That is where it ends. I have known her name for nine hours. I have wanted her since the pier.

Then the Pier Inn sold out from under her wedding, fifty-eight rooms gone in one email, and she walked into my shop forty minutes later with three plans already written in pencil. The papers put my share of the company I sold at one point one billion dollars. I have never read past the headline. I bought the hotel before four o'clock. She told me never to fix her problems with money again without asking her first.

I ask first now. I am learning to ask about everything.

Forty-eight days until the wedding. One of us is supposed to have some sense. She would like it to be me.

A Forbidden Age Gap Romance. Lake Arbor, Book One. Every book follows a different couple and reads as a standalone. Steamy: explicit, on-page, and fully consensual between adults. 18+.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HMKCQCV3
• ISBN13: 9798161294024
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.7" x 5.5"