The Botanist

They met in a registration queue at eighteen. They have spent every year since pretending it didn't matter.

Jennifer Morgan and Peter Cross have been each other's closest friend for over twenty years - through separate lives, separate marriages, and a string of perfectly innocent weekends away that were never quite as innocent as they told themselves. He's ex-Royal Navy, steady and watchful, a man who has spent his whole life protecting other people and never quite learning how to ask for what he wants. She's a solicitor with a career she's proud of and a marriage that quietly stopped working years ago. Neither of them has ever said the thing they've both always known.

Until one weekend, back in the city where it all started, the excuses finally run out.

The Botanist is a steamy, emotional second-chance romance about two people who have loved each other since they were teenagers and are finally brave enough to stop pretending otherwise. From a hotel bar in Nottingham to a Scottish island distillery to a final reckoning on the banks of the Thames, this is a slow burn that becomes anything but slow - full of longing, heat, heartbreak, and the particular joy of finally getting what you've wanted for twenty years.

This friends-to-lovers, forbidden romance is for readers who love:

• Slow burn tension that finally, satisfyingly breaks
• Second chance love between two people who've never stopped loving each other
• A steamy contemporary romance with real emotional stakes
• A hero who is quietly, completely devoted
• A heroine who finally chooses herself
• A guaranteed happily ever after

Contains explicit content intended for adult readers.