"Friends to lovers at its best-- a sweet indulgence I couldn’t put down!” - R.S. Grey, USA Today Bestselling Author
Baking Me Crazy, the first in the romantic comedy Donner Bakery Series of standalones, from Karla Sorensen is available now!
I'm Levi Buchanan, and until five years ago, I thought the legend of my family's curse was a load of crazy, Southern nonsense.
No curse can make you fall in love at first sight. No curse can force a true, deep, passionate, all-consuming love that will haunt you all the days of your life.
Then I met Jocelyn Abernathy and I realized how completely wrong I was.
The problem is, Jocelyn guards her feelings like well-armed soldier. She's the most beautiful, stubborn, infuriating woman I've ever met. Every time she talks, I want to kiss the living daylights out of her. But I can't.
Because when we met, she didn't need true love. She needed a best friend. And that's what I've been to her... for five years.
But when Jocelyn meets a handsome stranger her first day working at Donner Bakery and she lets him buy her a dill pickle cupcake, I realize with ominous regret that I may have missed my window with my best friend.
If I can't get her to see past our friendship, my new curse may be to watch the love of my life move on with someone else.
'Baking Me Crazy' is a full-length contemporary romantic comedy, can be read as a standalone, and is book#1 in the Donner Bakery series, Green Valley World, Penny Reid Book Universe.
Download your copy today!
My review: 5 stars!
I loved Baking Me Crazy so much- it was perfection! Penny Reid is an absolute literary genius and I am over the moon for her Smartypants Romance spin-off books. I adored going back to Green Valley and the cameos from favorite Winston Brothers characters were fantastic. But Joss and Levi stole the show with their friends-to-lovers story. Levi's courting of Joss had me swooning. Together they were magic- his thoughtfulness and her ultra strong determined personality went together so well. This story was so unique and different and had me smiling he whole way through. I am so excited to read more Smartypants books!
Excerpt:
"Besides, this is
my best friend perk. Shouldn't I get perks in baked goods?"
She cut me a look.
"You've been getting those perks for two years, Buchanan. Don't even
pretend you didn't put on a solid ten pounds that first year I started
baking." Quite pointedly, she looked at my stomach, which we both knew was
covered in muscle.
“That's rude," I
mumbled under my breath. I flexed my bicep. Nero licked my elbow since it was
right in front of him. "Yeah, ten pounds in my left arm maybe."
The noise she made roughly
translated to you are ridiculous. She made that sound at me a lot. Of course,
the sad truth of the matter was that I was ridiculous.
Not once in the past
five years had my feelings lessened for her. I had just learned to live with
them. In my junior year of undergrad, I was taking a class on brain pathology
in injuries, and a man came to talk to us about how he learned to live without
his right arm after it was amputated.
He told us about how,
even years after he lost his arm, his brain still triggered sensations to the
limb that was no longer there. The adult brain, in particular, struggled to
reorganize after the loss of a limb, and given that four out of five amputees
suffer from phantom pain symptoms, some of which were incredibly debilitating,
it was a lesson that stuck with me.
I wasn't fool enough to
think that me loving Jocelyn was on par with a man who’d lost his arm, but
something about the way he talked plucked at a chord inside me. Sometimes my
brain struggled to remember that we were just friends.
She'd never dated,
never even hinted that she wanted to. She'd never given me a longing glance.
Never stared at my mouth like she wondered what it tasted like.
But my hands never, not
once, stopped wanting to reach for hers. My fingers always, always itched to
dig into her crazy hair and see what the curve of her scalp felt like.
My brain knew what this relationship was, but
sometimes, the signals it sent to the rest of my body didn't always match up
with the truth of our situation. We worked out together a lot, Joss and I, and
when she got frustrated with the limitations of her body, I always wanted to
wrap my arms around her.
I wanted to pull her
into the curve of my body, absorb her dissatisfaction into my skin, and carry
it for her. That was the irony when she made noises like that.
She had absolutely no
clue how ridiculous I really was.
About Karla Sorensen
Karla Sorensen has been an avid reader her entire life, preferring stories with a happily-ever-after over just about any other kind. And considering she has an entire line item in her budget for books, she realized it might just be cheaper to write her own stories. It doesn’t take much to keep her happy…a book, a really big glass of wine, and at least thirty minutes of complete silence every day. She still keeps her toes in the world of health care marketing, where she made her living pre-babies. Now she stays home, writing and mommy-ing full time (this translates to almost every day being a ‘pajama day’ at the Sorensen household…don’t judge). She lives in West Michigan with her husband, two exceptionally adorable sons and big, shaggy rescue dog.
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About Katie Ashley
Katie Ashley is a New York Times, USA Today, and Amazon Top Five Best-Selling author of both Indie and Traditionally published books. She lives outside of Atlanta, Georgia with her daughter, Olivia, her two rescue dogs named for Disney Princesses, Belle & Elsa, an out-numbered cat, Harry Potter, and one Betta fish. She has a slight obsession with Pinterest, The Golden Girls, Shakespeare, Harry Potter, and Star Wars. 
