NOT YOUR SUMMER

He put up a posting. Seven lines. No photograph. The requirements were listed with the efficiency of a man who wrote hardware orders: punctual, socially comfortable, willing to engage with extended family for one summer. Compensation: a furnished cottage, full board, and a stipend. He needed someone to play his girlfriend at his grandmother's eighty-fifth birthday reunion so the whole Harlow family would stop asking questions. He expected someone practical. He got Ivy Callahan.
Ivy came to Meadow Creek, Vermont, to escape a Boston life that had started to feel like someone else's choices. Her apartment was fine. Her job was fine. The man she had been carefully almost-loving for two years was also, devastatingly, fine. Beck Harlow's posting was absurd and specific and had an end date, which was exactly what she needed. What she did not need was to discover what happened when a man who never paid attention to anyone paid all of his attention to her.
For eleven weeks, the arrangement held. Fake-held. On paper only. Because somewhere between the first public performance and a wildflower meadow at golden hour and the morning she realized he had been counting something she did not know she was doing, the terms of the agreement started to feel less like a contract and more like the most honest thing either of them had managed in years.
Beck Harlow is grumpy in the precise way of a man who knows exactly who he is and has decided the world can meet him there. He does not ask for things. He does not perform warmth. He tracks the specific difference between Ivy's real laugh and her social one, and he has seven categories of it by week three, and he calls this professionally counterproductive, and then he calls it adjacent, and then he runs out of words that are not the accurate one.
He falls first. He falls completely. And then she says the wrong word at the wrong moment, and he hears it through a screen door, and he has two drinks in his hands and the whole summer behind him.
NOT YOUR SUMMER is a standalone fake-dating, grumpy-sunshine, he-falls-first small town romance with a guaranteed happily ever after, no cheating, and no cliffhanger. Perfect for readers who want the slow burn that earns every page, the black moment that breaks them, and the grovel that repairs everything.
If you've been searching for the fake dating romance that feels real from the first chapter, this is the one.
Read NOT YOUR SUMMER today.

Jasmine Ashworth writes contemporary romance about ordinary people finding extraordinary love. A lifelong believer in second chances, grand gestures, and happily ever afters, she creates stories that blend emotional depth with swoon-worthy romance.
When she's not writing her next billionaire hero or dreaming up impossible-to-resist meet-cutes, Jasmine can be found buried in a good book, drinking too much coffee, and rewatching her favorite rom-coms for "research purposes."