Tempting Faith Books in Order

Susan Mallery's Tempting Faith grouping pairs two romantic suspense novels in which attraction develops while characters face danger and uncertainty. Tempting Faith concerns an injured man whose memory cannot be trusted, while The Only Way Out follows a mother trying to recover her kidnapped child. They offer different central couples, connected more by their mixture of romance, secrecy, and urgent personal stakes than by a single love story continued across two volumes.

In Tempting Faith, Cort Hollenbeck is an agent struggling with gaps in his memory. Faith Newlin, whose work involves caring for wild animals, becomes important to him at a time when he cannot rely on his understanding of what has happened. Their attraction must develop beside that uncertainty, making trust a practical concern as well as a romantic one.

Faith's experience with animals gives her a different background from Cort's dangerous profession. Their meeting places a woman accustomed to care beside a man carrying questions about his own past and present circumstances. For Cort, wanting to be close to someone does not remove the problem of missing information; for Faith, offering help means becoming involved with a person whose situation she cannot fully know.

The Only Way Out shifts to Andie Cochran, whose former husband has taken their child to another country. She needs a way to bring her child home and turns to Jeff Markum for help. Jeff has reasons of his own to become involved, including a desire for revenge against the man she is trying to escape, so their interests overlap without necessarily being identical.

The need for help makes trust unavoidable before either couple can feel completely safe.

Both books give the romantic relationship an external problem with real consequences. Cort's memory gaps raise questions about what can be believed, whereas Andie's search makes the choice of an ally especially urgent. Those setups also allow the characters' emotional needs to matter under pressure: being attracted to another person is one thing, but depending on that person when information is incomplete or a child is at risk asks for a much stronger commitment.

Read Tempting Faith first and The Only Way Out second for the original sequence, while expecting a new central situation in the latter book rather than a continuation of Cort and Faith's romance. The tone is romantic suspense, with vulnerability, concealed motives, and danger alongside the developing relationships. This pair is a useful starting point for readers who want Mallery's romances to include an urgent rescue or uncertainty about a character's past, and who enjoy seeing affection develop while the people involved still have difficult reasons to doubt one another.