There is a particular kind of romantic tension that lives in borrowed T-shirts, shared wine glasses, and babies who fall asleep on the wrong person’s chest. Kat Singleton knows exactly how to build it — and in More than Friends by Kat Singleton, the third book in the Pembroke Hills series, she constructs it with a patience and intimacy that earns every accelerating heartbeat.
The Setup That Changes Everything
Charlotte Davies is twenty-four, working as a bev cart girl at Pembroke Hills Country Club in the Hamptons, and freshly homeless. Her landlord has found summer renters willing to pay full price, and she has days to figure out where to go. Jude Kensington — billionaire, consummate charmer, and her best friend for almost a year — has a sprawling Hamptons home and entirely too many guest rooms. He offers to take her in. She says no. She shows up at his door with a dusty bottle of wine anyway.
That night, wine and candlelight do what months of carefully maintained friendship couldn’t. A kiss happens — brief, barely real, easy enough to blame on the wine. And then the morning arrives, and Jude opens his front door to find a woman from his past standing on the step with a car seat. His daughter. Four months old. Named Ava.
The Deal, the Baby, and the Problem with Convenience
The stroke of plotting genius in More than Friends by Kat Singleton is the timing. Charlotte needs a place to live. Jude, now unexpectedly sole caretaker of an infant he knew nothing about, desperately needs someone who knows the difference between a three-month onesie and a six-month one. What begins as mutual convenience — she gets a room, he gets a sanity anchor — slides, with aching slowness, into something neither of them can name safely.
What makes this work is not the situation but the character depth Singleton pours into both leads. Jude, famously the playboy of Pembroke Hills, is not simply charmed into fatherhood — he is undone by it. His first hours alone with Ava are rendered with a vulnerability that recalibrates everything the reader might assume about him. He doesn’t know how to make a bottle. He can’t figure out how to unfasten the car seat buckle. And he calls Charlotte fifteen times in one hour, not because he’s helpless, but because she is, already, the person he thinks of when everything feels unmanageable. Singleton captures that distinction beautifully: the difference between needing help and needing one specific person.
Charlotte is a fully realized character whose ambitions and insecurities exist independently of the romance. Her dream of opening a photography business, her complicated feelings about being the youngest and least traditionally successful of her siblings, her warmth and stubbornness — all of it is present and consistent. She never becomes a supporting character in her own love story. That’s rarer in the genre than it should be.
The Pembroke Hills World, Expanded
Readers who have followed the series from the beginning — starting with In Good Company, Cal and Lucy’s story, and continuing through Bad for Business, Ryker and Camille’s enemies-to-lovers spiral — will find the Hamptons world of More than Friends richly populated and warmly familiar. Lucy and Cal arrive a week early and walk into something nobody warned them about. The scene where they meet Ava is one of the book’s highlights, mixing genuine comedy with real tenderness. Singleton is skilled at ensemble work: the friendships in this series feel like friendships, not plot scaffolding.
For newcomers, the world is accessible. Each book functions as a standalone, though the satisfaction of watching these relationships layer and compound rewards those who have read from the start. The fourth installment, Long Story Short, looms on the horizon — and More than Friends teases what’s coming without losing focus on its own story.
The Slow Burn, Examined Honestly
What Works
The slow burn in More than Friends by Kat Singleton is genuinely earned. Singleton is disciplined about it. There are no manufactured misunderstandings designed to stretch the tension artificially — the obstacles are real. Jude’s new responsibilities. Charlotte’s fear of crossing a line she can’t uncross. The fact that they share a home, a baby, and a growing intimacy that already feels like more than friendship without anyone having to say it out loud.
The domestic detail is where Singleton shines brightest. The moments where Charlotte quietly rocks Ava to sleep, or Jude figures out the Pack ‘n Play directions only after forty-five minutes of stubborn refusal, or they share a glass of wine after successfully putting the baby down — these scenes do the heavy lifting. Singleton understands that sustained romantic longing is built from accumulated small moments, not grand declarations.
Where It Strains
At roughly 400 pages, More than Friends occasionally shows the seams of its extended word count. The middle third, while emotionally rich, loses narrative momentum as the book settles into a rhythm of domestic routine interrupted by charged glances. Certain beats feel repeated rather than deepened. Charlotte’s internal monologue revisits the same conflict enough times that even invested readers may wish the story would move her forward more decisively.
The question of Ava’s mother and the circumstances of her abandonment also deserves fuller weight. It is handled with compassion, but given how dramatically it reshapes Jude’s life, the emotional processing on his end feels slightly compressed.
What Kat Singleton Does Best
Singleton’s prose is conversational and immediate — it moves the way people actually think, catching itself mid-sentence, returning to things, noticing small details that accumulate meaning. She has a gift for capturing the particular humor of two people who know each other well enough to be ridiculous together: the Go Fish game played over three bottles of wine, the running commentary on Jude’s charm that Charlotte delivers while being completely charmed by him.
Her previous work, including the Black Sheep series, showed a consistent interest in characters who build walls around the things they want most and then find themselves surrounded by someone who makes those walls feel unreasonable. More than Friends by Kat Singleton continues that tradition with confidence. She writes attraction as something cumulative rather than instantaneous — a harder and more rewarding thing to do.
The Verdict
It is not a perfect book. The pacing sags in places, and some emotional territory is revisited more than necessary. But its imperfections are the imperfections of a book that cares too much rather than too little. Singleton knows these characters thoroughly, and it shows.
For readers who have loved the Pembroke Hills world, this is essential. For those arriving new, it is a confident and deeply felt introduction to a writer who understands that the best romances are not about falling in love but about realizing — too slowly, too late, exactly on time — that you already have.
- The Proposal by Vi Keeland — sharp, tension-filled forced proximity with equally matched protagonists
- People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry — friends to lovers across years, rendered with precision and longing
- The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez — emotional and warm, with the same balance of humor and heartbreak
- Beach Read by Emily Henry — dual-POV slow burn set in a temporary shared space
- The Wrong Mr. Right by Erin McCarthy — a single-dad romance with genuine emotional grounding
- One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston — witty and full of the kind of yearning that makes you ache