AUTHOR: Shirley Penick GENRE: Contemporary Romance PAGES: 202 RELEASED: 1 July 2018 SERIES: Burlap and Barbed Wire #3 SYNOPSIS: Friends forever. Chase Kipling and his twin brother Cade have been best friends with Katie since grade school. They hang out together all the time, riding horses, playing cards, going to movies and sporting events. A fun friendship for all three of them. Until a new guy in town mentions what a sexy woman she is. Chase sees red at the comment, how dare some guy lust after his best friend. Sure, she’s beautiful and sexy and has a great laugh… and now his eyes are opened and there’s no turning back. Katie Jackson has known Chase since first grade, she’s had a crush on him since middle school, and loved him since, well, probably forever. But he’s got her firmly in the friend zone and she has no idea how to change that. Or if she even wants to risk changing it. After all friends is better than nothing. Isn’t it? This book was kindly sent to me by Give Me Books PR in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own Saddle up for a swoony friends-to-lovers romance set against the backdrop of a small Colorado town filled with gorgeous cowboys.
Katie has been besties with Kipling twins Chase and Cade since forever, but she’s been crushing on Chase for the better part of ten years. She’s always wanted to try to take their relationship further, but is scared about stuffing up their friendship. Chase, on the other hand, is completely oblivious to Katie’s feelings, only seeing her as his best friend forever - together with Cade, they’re the three musketeers, always up for a horse ride, game of poker, or karaoke night at the bar. But when Tim Jefferson, his sister-in-law’s brother, visits and starts flirting with Katie and talking about how gorgeous she is, a switch is flipped for Chase and he’s hit with the realisation that his best friend if stunning and an attraction grows. When the window at her store is smashes and she spends the night a Rockin’ K Ranch, Katie senses a shift in Chase and decides to bite the bullet and tell him what she wants - him. They both want to take the jump, but in doing so, they risk changing a life-long friendship forever. You had me at friends-to-lovers! As with the previous two books in this series, Shirley’s writing has such a great way of pulling you into the story and into the lives of the Kipling family. And while this book didn’t take place at Rockin’ K as much, therefore we didn’t see a lot of the rest of the family, we did get to see more of town life, which was had slowly been introduced to in the first two books. So while I’m bummed we didn’t really get to see much of Beau & Alyssa and Adam & Rachel and the continuation of their stories, it was nice to flesh out this world more. Katie is such a fun character and I really enjoyed seeing her friendship with the twins and how her and Chase moved their friendship into a romance. Friends-to-lovers is one of my favourite tropes, and this one just felt so natural - you could feel how strong their friendship was and why they were both reluctant to change that in the hope that a romantic relationship would work. There wasn’t a lot of angst or roadblocks with this couple, other than the underlying mystery in the story, so it was refreshing to have a romance on the lighter sider where the only real struggle was the leap to take the risk of turning a friendship into a romance. As with the previous books, Shirley wove in an underlying mystery amongst the main romance, although this mystery was tied a lot more closely to the characters than what we saw in the previous two books. It adds a nice layer of depth to the story and this world, making it more than just a simple small-town cowboy romance. I’m excited to see what interesting subplot Shirley weaves into the rest of the series. I seriously CANNOT get enough of ranch life in Colorado and the Kipling family, and even though there are still three books to go in this series, I don’t want to say goodbye to what has become one of my favourite romance families! Is your bag packed for Colorado yet? Because it’s time to go find a ranch full of swoony cowboys! Get your yeehaw on and dive into this must-read cowboy romance series. |
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