Open Seat - Paperback

by Erica Choinka (Author)

For fans of The West Wing and Scandal, this slow-burn, political romance debut delivers the heat and high stakes that will make you sweat.

In a town where information is currency, the safest thing Maddy Caldwell can do is keep her heart out of the negotiation.

Maddy learned the hard way what happens when you let someone into your personal life and your professional one at the same time, and the rule she built from that lesson has carried her all the way to press secretary for the Governor of Missouri. The night before she starts, a stranger rescues her from the ex who taught her that lesson and gives her thirty minutes of conversation that feel dangerously easy before he disappears into the dark.

She tells herself she'll never see him again, and she's wrong in the worst possible way. Because when the legislative session opens, Nate Ridgeway is sitting across the negotiating table as chief of staff to the Speaker of the House. Now the Governor's signature education bill is caught between their two offices and Maddy's career is riding on the outcome.

Nate is direct in a building full of performers. He's the same person in every room and Maddy keeps waiting for him to reveal the calculating operative underneath, because in her experience the ones who seem safest are the ones who cost you the most. But in the Missouri State Capitol, everyone is watching, every alliance has a price, and the higher the bill's stakes climb, the more Maddy has to decide whether the one rule she made for herself is protecting her or just keeping her alone.

In politics, the open seat is the one everyone wants. He only wanted the one next to her.

OPEN SEAT is a slow-burn, rivals-to-lovers workplace romance told in dual POV, written by a decade-long Missouri statehouse insider.