Alison

Alison Pierce is twenty-four, a yoga and fitness instructor, and the woman Hunter Mercer intends to marry. Nobody in his family had met her properly until the Sunday she walked through the front door in February in a cropped sports bra and sheer floral leggings, with a ring already on her finger.

She is built by her own work and she does not hide it: long straight blonde hair, dark brown eyes under thick lashes, full glossed lips, tanned skin still flushed from a class. A narrow waist, a high full chest, and an enormous, perfectly round, heart-shaped ass earned by years of squats — a figure that arrives in a room several seconds before she does.

She is sweet, warm and entirely immovable. She does not argue, raise her voice or negotiate. She says what is going to happen and then smiles at you until it happens. Hunter fetches her sweetener without being asked twice; when he brings the wrong one, he goes again, cheerfully, and she never has to look up.

She has never read a book about female-led relationships and would not understand why anyone would. The life she has planned is already settled in her mind: a wedding, a house built on her parents' land in rural Nebraska, children raised near her own family. It is not a proposal. It is an arrangement she expects the Mercers to accommodate.

Alison has never once been told no by a man. She has no reason to believe that will change — and no patience with the woman who intends to be the first.