Reasonable Doubt by Patty Padron

BOOK BLAST

Book Title: Reasonable Doubt

Author/Publisher: Patty Padron

Cover Artist: Patty Padron using AI

Release Date: August 15, 2026

Tense/POV: third person, past tense, alternating POV

Genres: Contemporary MM Romance, Romantic Suspense, Legal/Courtroom Drama

Tropes: Forbidden love, attorney/client, opposites attract, slow burn, forced proximity, age difference

Themes: Trust, redemption, justice, vulnerability, overcoming the past, 

finding love when you least expect it

Heat Rating: 4 flames

Length:  87 059 words/185 pages

It is a stand-alone book. A sequel is planned.

It does not end on a cliffhanger

Goodreads

Buy Links

Amazon US | Amazon UK

He was supposed to prove his innocence, not fall in love with him.

Blurb

When brilliant New York defense attorney Casper Malak takes the murder case of Sean Lancaster, a former Marine turned bartender accused of killing a notorious crime boss, he expects the fight of his career. What he doesn’t expect is to fall for the man he’s sworn to defend. As the trial barrels toward a verdict and the evidence threatens to destroy them both, Casper and Sean must decide whether love is worth risking everything. Reasonable Doubt is a steamy, emotionally charged M/M romance that blends gripping courtroom drama with a hard-won story of redemption, trust, and finding home in the last person you expected.

Excerpt

The interview room was stark, containing only a metal table and two chairs beneath fluorescent lights that flickered annoyingly overhead. Sean Lancaster was cuffed, his knuckles scraped, his orange jumpsuit wrinkled and stained. Yet, he sat leaning back in his chair with the bored air of a dinner guest politely enduring a story he’d already heard twice.

He turned when the heavy steel door swung open with a petulant groan. In strode Casper.

The man was sharp-edged perfection; six feet of lean muscle wrapped in a midnight-blue suit that hugged every line of his body.

The white shirt underneath was open at the collar, just enough to show a strip of tanned skin. Sean’s eyes snagged at the curl of dark hair along its edge.

“Jesus,” Sean breathed, straightening in his seat without meaning to.

This guy had a jaw that looked carved out of stone, rough with stubble that should’ve made him look unpolished, but somehow didn’t, which just made things worse. Or better. Whatever.

And his eyes.

Yeah, whoever this guy was, those eyes were gonna be a problem. Those sharp blues locked onto Sean like he’d already figured him out whether he liked it or not.

Sean held the look a second, then another, before he remembered he really should be breathing.

His hair was a mess, dark and all over the place, like he’d run his hands through it one too many times, or maybe he just didn’t care enough to fix it.

Sean had the sudden, unhelpful thought that he’d like to make it worse.

And ok yeah, he should probably stop staring at his mouth like an idiot. But fuck those lips…

Sean’s hands twitched against the cold metal table watching him move into the room like a predator. Every step screamed control, confidence, and something so fucking dangerous.

As Casper set a sleek leather briefcase down with a soft thud, Sean noticed his hands. His fingers were strong and long and sent a jolt straight to Sean’s cock. He dropped into the seat opposite Sean and the faint scent of something expensive—sandalwood, maybe, mixed with a hint of wood smoke— drifted off him. Sean breathed it in despite himself, making his pulse kick hard against his ribs.

“Sean Lancaster,” Casper said.

The voice hit Sean square in the chest. It was rough, like whiskey poured over broken glass. His name in that mouth felt like foreplay. He leaned forward as he spoke it, elbows on the table, close enough that Sean could see the faint flecks of silver, like starlight, in those endless blue eyes. Sean’s gaze dropped to Casper’s full and infuriatingly kissable lips.

The space between them crackled, forcing Sean to shift in his seat, his unforgiving jumpsuit hiding nothing.

Casper smirked, just a twitch at the corner of his mouth, like he knew exactly what he was doing, and Sean felt caught between wanting to punch that smug beautiful face and wanting to drag him across the table to find out how all that stubble felt against his skin.

“And you are?” Sean asked with feigned calm.

“Casper Malak, your attorney, as of twenty minutes ago.”

“Huh. You don’t look like the Public Defender type. You look like you bill by the hour and don’t return calls. But damn, counselor, if I’d known they were sending me an angel, I’d have gotten arrested sooner.”

Casper didn’t smile, not really.

“I am not from the Public Defender’s office. I’m with the firm Malak, Mercer, and Vale. I’m taking your case, pro bono.”

“Why?” Sean asked, studying Casper’s face.

Casper didn’t answer. He opened a thin leather folder, glancing briefly at the documents inside before lifting his gaze again. Then silence as he studied Sean for a long beat.

“You reading my file or my face?” Sean asked sarcastically.

“They’re remarkably similar—complicated, and colorful, yet frustratingly vague.”

“Flattered. You flirt with all your clients, or just the ones in cuffs?”

There was a glimmer of something in Casper’s expression—amusement, maybe, or curiosity. No… restraint.

He flipped a page. “You’re accused of murder. You have no alibi, but also no motive. However, they have your fingerprints on the murder weapon, and a witness who can place you at the scene around the time of the crime. As though that weren’t enough, you have an established pattern of unsavory behavior…petty crimes, bar fights…Makes the DA’s office think they can make these charges stick.”

“So, should I start picking out wallpaper?”

“I don’t think that at all,” Casper said.

“And what do you think?”

Casper looked up, their eyes locking. Sean’s green eyes were defeated, bruised with exhaustion. Casper’s were ocean-deep and cold, until they weren’t. “I think you don’t believe you will walk out of here.”

Sean didn’t answer. He didn’t look away, either.

“What outcome do you expect if you aren’t going to take this seriously?” Casper asked.

Sean shrugged. “Hell if I know, but I sure as hell wasn’t expecting… you.”

“What did you expect?”

“I was expecting a troll from the Public Defender’s office.” Sean smirked. “Someone easier to lie to.”

Casper closed the file. “Here’s how this is going to work: you’re going to tell me everything. The truth, no riddles. No bullshit. I’ll decide if you’re worth saving.”

“And if I am?”

Casper responded without hesitation. “Then I’ll burn the world down to do it.”

There was the tiniest shift in Sean’s posture, like something deep inside him uncoiled.

“You’re really not what I expected,” Sean said in a near whisper.

Casper stood. “Good.” He walked to the door and just before he knocked to have it opened—

“Hey, Cas?”

Casper turned, an eyebrow raised at the easy familiarity. “Yes?”

“You fuck me over… I’ll make you disappear so clean even your trust fund won’t know where to start looking,” Sean said with a bravado that didn’t quite land.

Casper studied him for a second, then smiled, the first real one. “I’ll be back to take your statement. And in the meantime, Lancaster, start believing you deserve to be saved.”

The door clicked shut, and Sean leaned back again, watching it. And inexplicably, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t feel so alone.

About the Author

Patty Padron is a teacher, author, and lifelong storyteller who traded the East Coast for the Arizona desert. Born and raised in New Jersey, she now writes contemporary romance about complicated people, unexpected connections, and the moments that change everything.

When she isn’t teaching or writing, Patty can usually be found dreaming up her next story, often early in the morning before work or late at night when the rest of the world has gone quiet.

Reasonable Doubt is her M/M romance combining a slow-burn love story with courtroom drama, suspense, and two men who discover that sometimes the greatest risk isn’t trusting someone with your freedom, it’s trusting them with your heart.

Author Links

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To Failure by CJ Ashworth

NEW RELEASE

Book Title: To Failure (MM PHYSIQUE, Book 1)

Author and Publisher: CJ Ashworth

Cover Artist: Wolfsparrow Covers

Release Date: October 27, 2026

Tense/POV: First person/Alternating POV — Eli's chapters in past tense, Soren's in present tense.

Genres: Contemporary MM Sports Romance (competitive bodybuilding)

Tropes:  Rivals to lovers, opposites attract, forced proximity, hurt/comfort, touch-starved, age-gap-adjacent (both men in their forties)

Themes: What a body is for; addiction and withdrawal; grief for an older brother; a father who only knows how to ask what his son weighs; asking for help

Heat Rating: 4 flames

Length: 78 000 words / approx. 300 pages

It is a standalone story with a hard-won HEA. It does not end on a cliffhanger. 

Goodreads

 

Buy Links - Available in Kindle Unlimited

Amazon US | Amazon UK

He calls it strength. Knowing when to stop.

Blurb

In a sport that runs on the word more — more size, more chemistry, more — Eli has spent fifteen years on the opposite one: enough.

He competes natural, carving his body down to exactly what it should be and no further — a shape that has to win on proportion, because it gave up winning on size. He trains before dawn, alone — the hand at everyone else's back on the last brutal rep, and no one at his. He calls that strength. Knowing when to stop.

Then Soren walks into his gym. Open-division, sponsored, engineered past anything a natural body can do — and still convinced, in the place no trophy touches, that he isn't enough. He's everything Eli swore off. He's also the first man who's ever wanted to stand at his back.

A rivalry of opposites becomes something Eli has no careful word for, just as the chemistry in Soren's blood starts taking him apart.

 

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR 

A note from the author: I build these books and write them with an AI as my drafting partner — the English prose is AI-drafted from my direction and worked over by me, line by line. My KDP listing declares it in full. The cover is not AI.

 

CONTENT NOTES 

Running through the book: anabolic steroid use, dependence and withdrawal — no substance is named and no injection appears on the page. Heart damage caused by it, diagnosed late and permanent. Extreme contest preparation, and a body watched in a mirror until the watching has stopped being a choice.

In particular: a man whose brother died of this sport at thirty-one, and a father who has only ever known how to ask his son what he weighs. One scene in which one of these men goes looking for the cruelest thing he can say, says it, and puts a hand on the other's chest and shoves. A video of the two of them, filmed without their knowledge, makes the rounds of the sport. Two explicit sex scenes. In a late chapter, a character describes how close he once came to going off a bridge and feels the pull of it return; he does not act on it, and he asks for help.

Not in this book: blood, beatings, sexual assault, cheating, homophobic abuse, or a coming-out story. Nobody is outed to their family. Nobody dies inside these pages.

 

Excerpt 

Before five most mornings the gym is mine, which only means it’s a thing nobody else is awake to want. I’d come up off the bench an hour earlier out of the dream I always have — my brother on a stage, the lights, my own hand not finishing the reach — and done what I do after that dream, which is go to the rack in the dark and take the one or two reps I make every client of mine leave behind. I unrack the bar onto my back, step out, and go down with it, alone. There’s no one to catch it out of the hole. There never is. At the bottom — where the legs hand off to nothing, where a man wants the spot most — I drive it up myself, rack it, and the iron rings too loud in the empty room and sinks. That’s the morning. Every morning. I’d have told you I wanted nothing else from one.

By the time the gray started thinking about coming up I’d wiped down, pulled a shirt on, and gone up front to open — counted the float, keyed the register, reached to turn the sign on the door.

That’s when it went, and let a man in out of the dark. Cold air came crawling in low across the floor. I looked up, my hand still on the sign.

A man in the doorway, streetlight at his back, and for a second only a shape — and the shape was big. You read it before he’s all the way in: the spread of the shoulders, the column of the neck, the swell where the arms tie in. Enhanced, said the clerk in the back of my skull, before I’d asked it to. Natural doesn’t lay thickness on like that, and I’d know. I’m one of the ones it never came to.

But it wasn’t the size that stopped me.

He came off the door and the light let go of him, and in those few steps across my floor the ceiling went, all at once, low. Same rubber, same chalk, and still there stood some other height over his head the building hadn’t accounted for — a body that belonged on the far side of the wall of light, come down to this side of it by some clerical error. The illusion had me in under a second. Beyond the ceiling.

The body moved before I did. Something in my chest jumped without asking my leave, skipped the whole practiced read I do without thinking, and only wanted to look. To look longer. I caught up late to how rude the wanting was and pulled back exactly as far as I’d been drawn.

Then the glare came off his face. Not handsome — that wasn’t it, and it wasn’t trying to be. The eyes. Eyes used to being priced, and behind them something held hard and shut, that wasn’t going across any counter no matter who was paying.

And I’d looked up into those eyes before.

Never met him. Didn’t know the face, the name, would have sworn on anything I’d never stood in a room with him in my life. And still the dream came up whole behind my open eyes — my brother under the finals light, finding the back row without trying, his eyes coming down to land on a boy who couldn’t lift his hand to answer. I knew the exact distance of those eyes. I’d spent the whole night reaching for it and waking before I closed it. And here a man stood in my doorway at the wrong end of that same distance, and started across it, toward the counter, toward me.

“You’re not open,” he said. Not a question; he’d seen the sign.

“Few more minutes.”

He didn’t leave, and he didn’t come further in. He stood there and let his eyes go around the room instead — the rubber curling at the edges, the mirror on half the walls with the haze that won’t come off, the plates worn smooth past reading. Not pricing it. Making sure of it. A man checking whether a place was what he’d hoped, and the thing he seemed to be hoping was not that it’d be any good.

“I’m not a member,” he said. “What’s a day pass.”

I told him the visitor rate, which is low, the way everything here is low, and slid the waiver across the counter. “Sign at the bottom.”

 

About the Author 

CJ Ashworth writes MM romance set inside physique competition — the gyms at four in the morning, the food weighed to the gram, the years of it, and what men manage to do for each other in the middle of all that.

CJ started lifting at forty-five and first stood on a competition stage at fifty — then twice a year for the three years after that. The competing stopped; the training didn't. Fifty-five now, and still five or six mornings a week, ninety minutes at a time.

The gyms in these books aren't real gyms. The four a.m. is real, and so is the arithmetic.

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