They make love at the hospital, and Piper wrestles with conflicted feelings. This sign of her attachment to him is a turning point for them both. When a storm causes an accident on Brendan’s boat, Piper thinks Brendan is injured and rushes to the hospital in a panic. She makes friends and meets her grandmother, Opal. Brendan leaves for an extended trip to fish for king crab, a dangerous job that killed Piper’s father, and Piper occupies herself by working on the bar and getting acquainted with Westport. But their first sexual encounter is explosive. She tries to remain flirty and, when Brendan invites her to dinner, Piper insists that things between them remain casual because she is going back to Los Angeles. When Brendan stops wearing the ring and shows interest in Piper by helping her and Hannah restore the bar, her attraction grows. Piper is attracted to Brendan but resists flirting with him because he still wears his wedding ring. What he sees intrigues him, and Brendan decides to pursue Piper, even though he’s not sure what a girl with millions of followers on Instagram could see in a set-in-his-ways fisherman. Brendan is aggravated by his attraction to Piper, but as he encounters her in various places around town-and rescues her from a cooking fire-he gets glimpses behind her glamorous façade. Brendan doesn’t like surprises, and he believes that the fashionable, attractive young woman from Los Angeles doesn’t fit with the settled, serious character of Westport.

He tells Piper bluntly that she doesn’t belong in a place like Westport and should go back to Los Angeles.īrendan Taggart has been widowed for seven years, and he’s fallen into a routine both on land and as captain of the fishing boat Della Ray, which his father-in-law turned over to him. They find that the bar is rundown and has been taken over by locals, including one tall, bearded fisherman who seems especially hostile. Piper’s younger sister, Hannah, goes with her. Her stepfather hopes that being on her own for three months will teach Piper responsibility, and Piper’s mother, who left Westport when her daughter was very young, agrees. Piper’s stepfather decides to teach Piper a lesson by sending her to a small coastal village in Washington state where she owns a bar left to her by her father, a fisherman who died young. The novel opens in present-day Los Angeles when 28-year-old Piper Bellinger, a pretty, rich party girl, gets in trouble for breaking into a hotel and throwing a party in the pool, a stunt she dreams up to divert attention from an embarrassing breakup with her boyfriend. The novel includes graphic sex and adult language. This guide refers to the paperback edition published by Avon Books in 2021. The novel was a #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestseller, enjoyed high visibility on the social media app TikTok, and was optioned for a feature film.

It happened one summer by tessa bailey