Black Friday. Black ice. Lives changed in a blink.

The lines in Miami financier Jake Westin's world are crisp and easy to delineate: black and red, profit and loss. On paper. Until the Friday after Thanksgiving when Allison Jeffries—a woman he’s heard about for four and a half years but never met—calls to tell him the world they’ve shared from opposite sides of the country will never be the same.  Pam and Kenny Rydell--Jake's best friend and only link to the "bad ol' days" of his youth—died in a car accident on the way to a Sierra ski resort, leaving their son, Caleb, with his grandmother, who upon hearing the news of her only daughter’s death went into cardiac arrest. In an instant, Caleb’s godparents--two grieving strangers who never imagined the worst-case scenario becoming a reality—must decide how to best care for the little boy they both love.

 Jake is determined to do the right thing for Caleb--even if that means facing demons from his own loss-filled childhood and dealing with the woman Kenny called “a sweetheart but wound too tight for her own good.” Allison suffers no illusion that she'd make a good mother. After all, hasn’t she let her computer business fill the gap left by a failed marriage and aborted pregnancy? But she'll do anything in her power to give her godson the life Pam intended for her son--even if that means sharing a house with the charismatic stranger Pam teasingly called “Jake the Rake--a broken heart waiting to happen.”