The Guy I Missed: A Friends-to-Lovers Small-Town Romantic Comedy (Cider Falls Steamy Rom Com Series Book 5)

Rule one of twenty years of friendship: do not notice that the quiet carpenter who fixes everything has been in love with you the whole time. Reader, I noticed. About two decades too late.

I needed three dry weeks — long enough to fix my flooded house and get the Harvest Festival open without a hitch. What I did not need was to spend them in the loft over Wes Carter’s workshop: the steadiest man in Cider Falls, who remembers exactly how I take my coffee, never lets me carry the heavy end of anything, and who I’ve spent my whole life filing safely under friend.

He’s the one person in this town who has never once let me down. He’s also the one I cannot afford to want.

Then the wall between our rooms turned out to be very thin, “strictly logistical” turned out to be impossible to laminate, and the whole town started watching. And betting — there’s a ledger, and my old choir teacher is running the book.

Tropes

• Friends to lovers (the twenty-year slow burn)
• He fell first — and never said a word
• Forced proximity (she moves into the loft over his workshop)
• Small-town romance
• Grumpy-quiet carpenter hero / over-laminating heroine
• Second chance at a dream (she writes music again)
• Found family / a whole town of meddlers (and one betting pool)
• Slow burn to open door

Cider Falls, Book Five. A steamy small-town friends-to-lovers, forced-proximity romcom with a guaranteed HEA. Reads as a standalone.