4.5⭐
Genre ~ contemporary romance
Series ~ North Carolina Highlands #1
Setting ~ North Carolina
Publication date ~ book ~ August 13, 2020, audio ~ January 11, 2024
Est Page Count ~ 416 (57 chapters)
Audio length ~ 11 hours 1 minutes
Narrators ~ Jason Clarke, Virginia Rose
POV ~ dual 1st
Featuring ~ retired pro footballer, billionaire, single mom, postpartum depression, close proximity, best friends to lovers, some steamage
My review:
Beau (36) & Annabel (35)
Beau is retired from the NFL and running a fancy schmancy resort with his family. When he learns his bff, Bel, is having a tough time he invites her and her mom to stay for a few weeks. He is going through his own health struggles that he’s finding hard to deal with.
Time to decompress at the resort seems like a fantastic idea to Annabel. She is a single mother to a 4 month old daughter and is suffering from postpartum depression. I don’t have experience with this myself, but I felt like the author did a phenomenal job showing the effects of it.
They have been best friends for 17 years, there for each other through thick and thin, but never mentioned their true feelings for each other as to not rock the friendship boat. Now, being in close proximity to each other is making it hard for them to ignore their feelings.
The emails from through the years were a great way to tell the story of their strong friendship and how close they are without really doing a past timeline. The family dynamics are tight knit for both families. The support system was wonderful all around. I liked that Annabel’s mom didn’t just come along to babysit and she found someone to occupy her time. The series will follow Beau’s siblings so it was nice to meet them and get a couple of snippets of what’s to come.
Overall, while I do think 17 years is an awful lot of wasted time, this is one of the top best friends to lovers books I’ve read. It’s not a secret where the story is going to lead us, but it’s more of an emotional journey of them finding their way to each other as they deal with their own issues separately and together. I didn’t care for the 3rd act of course, but I can possibly, maybe, but not really, but yeah sure see why it happened. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
Narration notes:
They both did a lovely job.
Get your copy on ~ Amazon
Add to your never ending TBR ~ goodreads
I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’ve read it.
Book blurb:
My name’s Beau, and for the most part, I’ve led quite the charmed life. I left college to play pro ball and collected a few Super Bowl rings along the way. Now that I’ve retired at the ripe old age of thirty-six, I’m in my second career as CEO of a five-star resort in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. Sounds great, right?
Well, I just did something real stupid, y’all.
Bel—that’s Annabel to the rest of you—my best friend since college, is struggling as a single mom. So of course I invited her to come stay at my family’s resort for some much needed R&R. But since I didn’t think it through, her visit is going to ruin everything.
How, you ask? Well, first of all, I’ve got a big, bad, ticking time bomb kind of a secret. Once she finds out what I’m hiding, I worry she’ll never look at me the same. Secondly, you remember the part about us being best friends? Well, I kinda maybe always thought there could be more to us. The naked kind of more.
So here’s my new gameplan. I’m going to keep her and that adorable baby Maisie at arm’s length while Bel gets back on her feet, and I will absolutely, under no circumstances, let her in on those naked thoughts of mine. That’s a fumble I can’t afford to make.
Until I do, in a moment of bonfire-and-bourbon induced weakness…SOUTHERN SEDUCER is a full length, standalone small town novel. It is the first book in the all new North Carolina Highland series.
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