Famous Hollywood producer Gregory Normand will do anything to stop his ex-husband's wedding.
He's been laying low since the divorce, sailing around the world and doing an excellent job of not thinking about Blaine?right up until he opens a magazine and finds his ex's wedding announcement staring back at him.
He sells his boat the same day and flies back to California.
There's one problem. After what he did to that marriage, Gregory isn't getting anywhere near Blaine's billionaire-hippie family. So he hires a failed improv actor who's been living in a hatchback, calls him "Zephyr"?an exclusive wellness guru?and walks him through the front door of their Marin compound as the subject of a documentary that does not exist.
It works perfectly until his fake guru starts believing his own hype, the groundskeeper ends up in the koi pond, and Gregory's oldest friend?an Academy Award-nominated actor who begged him not to do this?has to sit through a rehearsal dinner with the whole secret in his pocket.
Blaine clocked the con the moment he laid eyes on Gregory.
He's saying nothing. Because Blaine Cauthorne is an icy corporate litigator who has never missed a detail in his life. He's marrying an unbearably polished VP at the wellness app Glow, a man he chose the way a lawyer selects a jury?predictable, frictionless, and impossible to be hurt by. The moment he says one word about that guru, everyone he loves will know that Gregory can still get to him.
So they circle each other all week. Gregory building bigger and bigger lies because he doesn't know how to hand anybody a feeling without wrapping it in an enormous production first. Blaine refusing to look at any of it, because he nearly didn't survive the last time.
Two men who are magnificent at performing love and hopeless at admitting it. And one wedding that nobody is getting through in one piece.
The Naughty Ex is a funny, filthy, big-hearted MM rom-com about grand gestures, terrible ideas, and the difference between a beautiful Hollywood production and one plain true sentence. It's the third book in the Naughty series and can be read as a standalone novel.
