Format: ebook
Source: provided through NetGalley
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Date read: February 4, 2024
Bluebird Basin
1. Come As You Are
2. Lips Like Sugar - Paperback | Kindle
Jess K. Hardy
| Website | Amazon |
Synopsis (Goodreads):
Fake Date. Real Feels.Thoughts on Lips Like Sugar: We're back on the mountain (or near the mountain, really) as Red Falls gets ready for Ashley and Mad's wedding. Actually, their wedding isn't the focal point for Mira and Cole's thing, but it is the catalyst. Because of said wedding, Cole walks into Mira's bakery at exactly the right moment and Mira plants a kiss on the hunky ex-rocker and things move forward from there.
Mira Harlow has finally lost it. Between running her bakery, parenting her 14-year-old son, and taking care of her mom, she’s a stretched-thin mess. But kissing a total—and very sexy—stranger before begging him to be her date to the biggest wedding her small town has ever seen so her ex won’t think she doesn’t have one? That’s a whole new level of chaos, even for her.
The last thing Cole Sanderson expects when he drives into the ski town of Red Falls, Montana is to score a date to his best friend’s wedding. But since his ex-rocker life in Seattle is stagnating, when the gorgeous, green-eyed bakery owner propositions him to play the role of her long-distance boyfriend, stirring his punk-shenanigans roots to their core, he doesn’t hesitate to say, “Hell yes!”
Mira hopes for a fun night with her fake date, but when their wedding weekend turns into a genuine connection, when Cole returns to Seattle and she tries to go back to her normal life, she wonders if she missed out on something real. But Cole isn’t done with her yet, and when he finds his way back to Red Falls, she’ll have to decide what’s more important: clinging to the neat and tidy life she’s struggled to maintain, or taking a risk, embracing the chaos, and maybe even falling in love.
Lips Like Sugar is book 2 in the Bluebird Basin Romance series but can absolutely be read as a standalone. This story features two main characters in their fifties, lots of laughs, plenty of open-door steam, and so many butterflies.
Content notes: Living with and caring for a parent with mild cognitive impairment, addiction, relapse, an unhealthy ex, grown men deeply in their feels, strong friendships, conversations about love languages, and an absurd amount of Say Anything references, including a steamy riff on the airplane seatbelt sign scene…
On Mira's end, she's dealing with a lot. Some of it is self-inflicted (I don't meant that in a bad way, necessarily, but more in a "I have obligations and don't see a way out of them" sort of way) and some is the reality of dealing with an aging parent. The fake relationship she starts with Cole becomes more the longer they spend together. Which is kind of something Mira doesn't see coming because she doesn't expect more than that one fake-date night with him. BOY, was she wrong.
As for Cole, he's...well, he's kind of stuck. He's doing the things he loves and he's happy enough. At least that's what he tells himself. But spending time with Mira at the wedding shows him that happiness comes in a lot of different flavors and maybe what he thought was happiness before wasn't quite it. I don't know if that makes sense. Let's just say that Cole does some soul searching after his time on the mountain and he finds a different path that just might give him all the things he didn't know he needed.
A sweet kiss that starts it all, long conversations via text and phone, kiddos who want their respective parents to be happy, a truth bomb that makes Mira reevaluate everything, and an ex-rocker who loves hard. MAN, these two worked NICELY together. *thumbs up*
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