The Mock Engagement Mishap: A fake engagement, friends to lovers, small town military romance

I come home from deployment ready to finally confess that I’m in love with my best friend—and discover the whole town already thinks we’re engaged.

Tate Cavanaugh and I built our landscaping business from the ground up. While I was gone, she stretched the truth in a magazine interview to drum up some much-needed publicity. One wildly embellished newspaper story later, Huckleberry Creek is expecting a wedding.

Then Tate kisses me in front of my entire welcome-home crowd, and I do what any man who’s wanted her for ten years would do.

I go all in.

Suddenly I’m moving into her house, holding her hand through client meetings, and accepting free drinks from neighbors who’ve already started planning our future. Tate thinks we’re protecting the business until we can untangle the mess. I’m using every slow dance, lazy touch, and entirely unnecessary display of affection to show her exactly how good we could be together.

But the closer our fake engagement comes to feeling real, the more Tate panics. And when the reporter behind the original article comes looking for the truth, the lie that brought us together could cost us the business we built—and the friendship neither of us knows how to live without.

She’s afraid pretending will ruin everything.

I’m afraid she’ll never believe I mean it.