Hard: A Step-Brother Romance by Sosie Frost

Shay Franklin is preparing to attend the wedding of her father--a father who abandoned the family when she was a child and whose sole support was strictly financial--when a car accident took the lives of both her father and his new bride. She is now in charge of converting all the arrangements of a happy celebration into two separate funerals. As she is nursing her mixed feelings at the bar, she encounters the handsome Zach Harden, a Navy SEAL now on leave, who eventually breaks down her defenses and she ends up baring her soul to him. They eventually leave together and share a one-night stand that shakes both of them.

A few days later, as she is meeting with her father's attorney and preparing to discuss his Last Will, she is surprised to learn that her father had already married his new bride in a small ceremony before their accident and a portion of his extremely large estate will be shared with a stepbrother she has never met. She doesn't care about the money, and actually feels guilty about using any of it since she would rather have had a relationship with her father than to have him attempt to buy her love. However, she is miffed that her father didn't even bother to tell her he had already gotten married and had a new family. So with that blend of mixed feelings, she is not eager to meet her new stepbrother and is prickly about sharing anything that remains of her father. She is even more stunned and hurt when she meets the new stepbrother and realizes it is Zach, the guy she hasn't been able to get out of her head.

There is a lot of back-and-forth, hot-and-cold between them; Zach pushing for another chance with her, Shay not able to get over the fact that technically they are now related, and angry that he didn't tell her that fact before they got together. They are also both very young, she only 21, he is 24. Add into the mix that they are now sharing a huge 35,000 sq.ft. mansion and the huge fortune her billionaire father left them. Even with hopeful progression to their relationship and a bright future on the horizon, this is most definitely a HFN ending, but it works.

My version was an ebook, and one complaint I have was the poor editing. There were spelling and grammatical errors that occurred frequently and were a distraction and need to be addressed. ( )