When Bethany West swapped her lucrative modeling career for her dream job as a funeral director, she expected to blow the roof off the Victorian-era mortuary with her eco-friendly innovations and death positive attitude. Instead she's only managed to piss off her bitter business partner, George Smythe, a man dead set on maintaining the status quo and driving Bethany out of his family business. The workplace is hard enough, but might just kill her to keep pretending she doesn't have feelings for the grump in the gray suit-a man so rigid, he probably has embalming fluid surging through his veins. When the pair are forced together at a conference in New Orleans, Bethany finally gets the chance to exhume what's really buried beneath George's ice-cold contempt for the living. Little by little, he lets her dig. Soon enough, he starts to recognize not only the value of her business model, but an intense and dangerous attraction to the blonde bombshell mortician. Bethany learns the truth behind George's past, and it's worse than she suspected. Unless George opens up and leans on her-at the risk of succumbing to their cremation-level attraction-he'll jeopardize both the business and their hearts by refusing the true partnership they both need.