Sign-In
Cart
The Doctor and the Divorcee
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 18 2026
Pages: 278
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
She's done rebuilding for everyone else. He's done pretending sufficient is enough.
Layla Al-Mansoori has exactly three things she trusts completely: her six-year-old daughter Hana, her branding studio, and the walls she built after her divorce - sturdy, necessary, and maintained at considerable personal cost. She is not looking for anyone. She does not have the margin for anyone. And she is absolutely, categorically not interested in the cold, impossibly handsome pediatric surgeon who catches her falling off a ladder at a charity gala and has the audacity to lecture her about it.
Dr. Zain Malik has been running on sufficient for three years. Since his wife Sara died, he has been a good surgeon, a reasonably adequate father to his son Tariq, and a man who has kept everything functioning at the level required - not more, not less. He does not need disruption. He does not need the sharp-tongued, hazel-eyed graphic designer who nearly took out his SUV in a school parking lot and refused, without apparent effort, to be intimidated by him. He does not need to think about her at all.
He thinks about her constantly.
When their children become inseparable best friends and a relentless school principal traps them both on the sports festival planning committee, Layla and Zain are forced into the one thing neither of them was prepared for: proximity. And proximity, it turns out, is the one thing their very considerable combined capacity for self-protection cannot survive.
What follows is not a fast love story. It is a slow one - built in parking lots and rainstorms and cramped meeting rooms and late evenings in botanical gardens, in the specific, charged tension of two people who know exactly what they feel and have excellent, well-evidenced reasons not to act on it. It is a love story about grief and rebuilding and the particular courage required to choose something real after you have been hurt by something that felt real and wasn't. It is a love story set inside a Muslim community, where faith is not a backdrop but a framework - the source of both the restraint that gives the tension its particular, electric charge and the values that make these two people, each in their own complicated way, worth choosing.
There is no shortage of heat in these pages. It lives in a voice that drops half a register when composure finally gives. In a hand caught out of the air six inches from a face, on pure reflex, without a second's thought. In two people standing in an amber-lit room at nine-forty on a Thursday night with everything they have not yet said filling the space between them.
It lives in two words - not yet - that are not a refusal but a promise.
The Divorcee and the Doctor is a halal slow-burn romance for every woman who has ever rebuilt herself from a foundation someone else cracked, and who deserves, finally, a love story in which the man is worth the waiting.
Heat level: Halal/sweet - emotionally intense, no explicit content.
Themes: Second chance at love, single mother romance, widower romance, Muslim community, slow burn, faith and identity, co-parenting, family dynamics.
Ideal for readers of: Nailah Harris, Hana Khan Carries On, The Forty Rules of Love, and anyone who has ever wanted a Harlequin romance written for and about women of faith.
Also in
Romance
That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf (Mead Mishaps, Book 2)
Kimberly Lemming
Paperback
Sabine's Notebook: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Continues
Bantock, Nick
Hardcover
The Golden Mean: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Concludes
Bantock, Nick
Hardcover