Well Matched

 Well Matched by Jen DeLuca, 336 pages.

April is a forty-year-old single mom who is getting ready to send her daughter off to college and sell her house in small town Willow Creek to get an apartment in the city. When her friend Mitch Malone asks her to pretend to be his girlfriend for a family dinner (so his family will take him seriously and stop asking him about his relationships) in exchange for home repairs she's hesitant, because she's been single for a long time and also this is an insane request, but they're friends and it doesn't seem like a big deal so she agrees. But somehow situations keep happening where they have to pretend again and soon enough there are real feelings in their fake dating. 

A lot of this book is ultimately about April dealing with her own anxieties; about dating a younger man (who may want kids she can't have one day), about dating one of her daughter's teachers, about Mitch's promiscuous nature, about what her neighbors will say. Most of these anxieties are based on nothing but conjecture, but that's clinical anxiety for you (I think part of this book's happy ending probably should have been April getting a therapist). This book is very sweet and fun, and I'm probably going to end up reading all the books in the series (I wrote about the proceeding book, Well Played, last October, and that couple makes a cameo in this book). Much less Renaissance Faire in this book, which I found a little disappointing personally, but that wasn't the book's fault.