Introducing Never Just Friends

There are romances that begin with two strangers meeting. And then there are the dangerous ones.

The ones where two people already know exactly how the other takes their coffee. They know which stories they’ve heard a hundred times. They know how to work together without speaking, how to make each other laugh at the worst possible moment, and exactly which tiny habits will drive the other completely insane. They’ve already built the intimacy. They just haven’t admitted what it means.

That’s where Never Just Friends, the second book in my Summit Ridge series, begins.

Emma Carson and Tanner Reeves have spent four years insisting they’re friends. Best friends, really. They’re also coworkers who have traveled together, survived terrible hotels, developed years’ worth of private jokes, stolen each other’s pens, shared food, and become so accustomed to functioning as a seamless unit that neither one has ever stopped to examine what they’ve actually built.

Until one night changes everything. Because admitting your feelings is never complicated enough, Tanner makes a choice that hurts Emma deeply enough to fracture the friendship entirely.

Six months later, they’re barely speaking. That frosty distance would probably be manageable if their jobs didn’t suddenly require them to spend five days together at Summit Ridge. In one vehicle. Working as a pair. Participating in trust exercises. Sleeping in neighboring cabins.

Who could possibly see a problem with this arrangement?

One of the things I loved most about writing Emma and Tanner was that this isn’t a story about two people discovering they’re attracted to each other. They already know. That part is almost embarrassingly obvious. The real question is whether attraction is enough when trust has been deeply damaged. Emma can trust Tanner to belay her from a fifty-foot tower. She can trust him in a canoe. She can trust him to notice when she’s scared before anyone else does.

Trusting him with her heart again? That’s considerably harder.

Tanner doesn’t get to fix that with one grand romantic gesture. I wanted this book to be about the small, deliberate things that rebuild a relationship: respecting a boundary when it would be easier to push, staying in the conversation when it gets uncomfortable, making someone laugh without treating that laugh as forgiveness, and learning that loving someone does not mean you get to dictate when they should be ready for you.

Of course, Emma isn’t making the process painless. She is angry, competitive, and occasionally petty. Summit Ridge provides her with an impressive number of opportunities to weaponize all three: ropes courses, archery, team challenges, a blindfold, and at least one tree that probably deserves an apology.

But underneath the friction is the thing neither can escape: they are still ridiculously good together. The chemistry isn’t created by the retreat; Summit Ridge simply removes all the places they’ve been hiding it. Put them on a challenge and they fall right back into their old rhythm. Being furious becomes incredibly inconvenient when your rival is still the one who makes you laugh the hardest.

When they finally stop pretending none of that exists, things get intensely, passionately interesting. The heavy spice in this book is directly tied to years of familiarity colliding with six months of hurt and longing.

But the story doesn’t treat getting together as the finish line. I wanted to see Emma and Tanner actually be together—on ordinary Tuesdays, over takeout, doing laundry, and figuring out what sharing a life looks like without a zipline around to make everything feel important. It’s a love story about discovering that the ordinary parts are the most vital.

You do not need to have read Book One to jump into Emma and Tanner’s story, but readers of the series will find familiar faces waiting.

If you love:

• Friends to lovers

• Workplace romance

• Forced proximity & second chances

• Years of unresolved chemistry

• Sharp banter & petty competition

• A heroine who absolutely makes him work for it

• Spice with real emotional stakes

• Romances that continue after the couple gets together

Never Just Friends, Book Two in the Summit Ridge series, is available now on Amazon. Grab your copy and meet the two people who spent four years calling themselves friends, only to discover just how inaccurate that description has always been.

Happy reading!

~ Kara Lynne