title: A Groom Once Again
author: Sargeant, Patricia
description: This groom will need the right words to get back to the altar ...
  Cynical screenwriter Asher Tomlin needs help researching and writing the script for his company’s historical documentary. Before their divorce almost three years ago, Asher and his ex-wife had made an impressive scriptwriting team. Now Asher’s two business partners and best friends urge him to turn to her again. Asher doesn’t need much prodding, though, to commit to doing whatever it takes to reunite with his ex-wife.
  The clock is ticking for jaded editorial consultant Zora Dabney. Her biological clock, that is. While they were married, she and Asher had agreed to have children. Now she’s divorced and childless. So when Asher asks for her help creating the script for his documentary, she tests his claim that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get her to work with him.
  If Asher and Zora find a way to collaborate on the script, can they also find a way back to the altar?
  A Groom Once Again is a second-chance-at-love/reunion romance that reunites a mature couple. It's an adversaries-into-lovers, opposites attract love story.
  Chapter 1
  “You’re asking me to work for the company that destroyed my marriage.” Zora Dabney stood on the opposite side of her condo’s living room. She focused her glare squarely on her ex-husband, Asher Tomlin.
  No doubt about it. Zora was definitely the source of the chill in the air. Asher considered Zora across the length of the room. Ebony hair framed a beautiful, heart-shaped, cinnamon-kissed face. The dark mass was parted in the center and flowed in thick waves to her narrow shoulders. She’d lost weight in the three years since their divorce. So had he.
  Zora was backlit by the mid-morning April sunlight streaming through the white sheer curtains covering the living room’s bay window. It made reading her expression hard. Had she done that on purpose?
  “You’re being melodramatic.” Asher shoved his fists farther into the front pockets of his iron gray khakis.
  “On the contrary. I’m showing amazing restraint.” Zora crossed her arms over her chest. Her cream cotton jersey and lime linen pants accessorized her frosty disposition.
  “And what do you mean your marriage? It was my marriage, too.”
  “Trust you to come to that realization three years too late.”
  Asher scrubbed his face with both palms. Zora’s salty tone still stung. “Will you work with me on the research and scripting for the Sellsville Sluggers doc or not?”
  Asher and his two business partners and closest friends – Nathan Fletcher and DeAndre Portiss – had met and bonded more than twenty-three years before during their first year as communication majors at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. That’s when they’d also conceived the idea of telling the story of the Sellsville Sluggers, Columbus, Ohio’s, twentieth-century black baseball team.
  It was after that epiphany that Asher had met Zora. She’d followed the progression of the trio’s dream through graduation and the establishment of their independent documentary film production company, Fletcher Portiss Tomlin Productions or FPT.
  For this project, DeAndre was the producer and Nathan the director. Asher was the documentary’s researcher and writer.
  Zora shifted her stance. “Why are you asking me to work with you? Do you think I need the money?”
  “El’s working on the project.” Asher referenced his younger sister, Elisha Tomlin, who was a marketing consultant. “She’s helping Dre with the marketing campaign.”
  “I know.”
  Asher frowned. “Do you and El keep in touch?”
  “We’re still friends.” Zora’s chin tilted to a defensive angle.
  “You are? Do you talk about me?”
  Zora rolled her eyes. “Oh, please.”
  “Never mind.” Asher was nearing frustration. “If you don’t want money, what do you want to be paid with, Zo? Coffee? Books?” Zora stared at him in silence for so long that Asher began to believe she wouldn’t respond. He prompted her. “What do you want?”
  “Your sperm.”