Darragh Molloy has one rule: don't fall for the girl who knows all his worst parts. Captain of Kilmara University's field hockey team, town golden boy, son of a father whose own glory days ended in a bottle — Darragh has spent three years making sure nobody looks too closely at the cracks. Nobody except Órla. She's the one person who's seen him cry, seen him panic, seen him at 3 a.m. when the fear that he's already turning into his dad gets too loud to out-run. She's his best friend. She is absolutely not allowed to become anything else.

Órla Byrne doesn't do romance. Her father left when she was eleven with a wave and no forwarding address, and she learned young that people you love with your whole chest are the ones who leave fastest. Friends don't leave — not the way lovers do. That's the whole reason Darragh is safe. Was safe. Right up until she catches herself wanting things from him a best friend has no business wanting, and a stupid, reckless plan to help him fake a girlfriend for his father's homecoming throws them into every kind of proximity she can't survive.

One pretend relationship. One shared house for the summer term. One final season with scouts watching Darragh's every move and a graduate program in Rotterdam waiting to take Órla an ocean away from all of it. All they have to do is not mean it.

They mean it.

Now Darragh has to prove he's not the man he's terrified of becoming — and that loving Órla doesn't have to end the way everything else in his family has. Órla has to decide whether staying for someone is different from being left by everyone else. And both of them have to figure out if the best friendship of their lives can survive becoming the one thing they swore it never would.

Tropes: Friends-to-Lovers • College Sports Romance • Fake Dating • Only One Bed • He Falls First • Found Family