About This Book
Cassie Salazar is a sharp-tongued bartender and aspiring songwriter drowning in medical debt; Luke Morrow is an Army trainee about to deploy, carrying his own weight of bad decisions. Their arrangement is purely transactional — a marriage of convenience that gets Cassie the military health benefits she desperately needs and gives Luke a clean slate with his commanding officers. Tess Wakefield sets up the familiar scaffolding of a fake-relationship romance, then methodically dismantles it, forcing two people who have every reason to keep walls up to reckon with what happens when circumstances strip those walls away.
What distinguishes this novel is how grounded it stays even as the emotional stakes climb. Wakefield writes Cassie with a specific, unglamorous ambition — the kind that involves bad gigs and worse tips — and Luke's interiority carries real moral weight rather than convenient redemption. The dual perspective structure lets readers watch the gap between what each character admits to the other and what they quietly acknowledge to themselves, and that gap is where the tension lives. It's a romance built on friction and compromise rather than fantasy, which makes the eventual payoff feel genuinely earned.