Emotionally charged friends with benefits romance
What We Could Be
Coral Bay
Adult, New Adult, Friends to Lovers, Small Town Romance
Independently Published
January 15, 2026
Kindle, Paperback
06
The rules are simple: no feelings, no strings. But rules were made to be broken. And broken things hurt. As the owner of the Coral Bay Inn, I’ve built myself an uncomplicated small-beach-town life. Men? Simple: friends with benefits, no strings—the safest way to guard my heart. But Sebastian Sawyer isn’t just any guy. He’s been there from the start—before I had cheekbones, before my skin cleared. Before I turned heads. We were each other’s first everything. Now that long-ago geeky boy has muscles that belong on an action figure and a calm that’s hard to shake. Our long-tenured no-strings arrangement is perfect. But perfect things don’t last. When the inn needs repairs, Sebastian moves in to help. Spending our days and nights together shatters the balance and complicates everything. Sebastian wants forever—an F-word that scares me as much as feelings—so I safeguard my heart before his rewrites everything I swore against. Yet my foolish heart insists on following my body’s lead. Because forever with Sebastian could be perfect … but if forever breaks, so will I.
“Anyone who’s ever tried to breach a fortress-even in game-knows that the hardest part is breaking through all the layers of defense that protect its innermost core.”
Lily Baines kicks off her new Coral Bay series with the story of Ruby and Sebastian: childhood friends, each other’s “first”, and currently long-time friends with benefits. Located in the gorgeous Northern California coastal region, the Coral Bay Inn is not only the decaying Inn Ruby inherited from her aunt but the thing that has helped Ruby shed some of the insecurities developed through her broken childhood. Her confidence in herself blossomed as she grew the Inn into a thriving and successful business. But years of storms and a less than solid structure has become an issue in the cherished building that Ruby must now address if the Inn is to stay open. As a NASA engineer, Sebastian has the perfect skill set to deal with this issue and contractors and decides to extend his stay at home and help Ruby get this project done. This becomes the perfect metaphor for her life and her relationship with Sebastian as he begins to realize that the current status quo is unsustainable but may be difficult to overcome if Ruby is unwilling to repair the well-masked, damage she has been carrying since childhood.
What We Could Be is definitely not a slow build romance on the physical front. Ruby and Sebastian were close school friends and part of the small group of nerds who played DND and geeked out over SciFi. Neither drew the attraction of the opposite sex so they decided upon graduation that they would be each other’s “first”. Little did they know that as they both matured into attractive people their first intimate experience would grow into something so magnetic and like nothing they found with other partners. For the most part, their lives ran separately with Ruby running the Inn in close proximity to where they grew up and Sebastian working as an engineer for NASA in TX. But when visits to his parents brought him back to the area, their hook-ups were intense and uncomplicated, which is exactly what Ruby thought she wanted in life. But Sebastian’s extended stay to help her with the structural repairs of the Inn causes their long-established understanding to crumble under the weight of the realization of what they really mean to each other.
Love. Years. Him. Each word struck another crack in the seawall. She didn’t have to say his name – just that word, him – and my heart split clean in two. Everything I’d held back poured out, drowning me. The tsunami hit. it crashed through me, merciless, unrelenting, and the tears broke free, rushing down my face as wildly as the wave inside me. My chest heaved as the ocean of pain and longing and love, so much love – surged untamed. it shredded down every defense and left me gasping in its force.
What We Could Be is definitely an angsty story that is less a Friends to Lovers romance in the traditional sense and more accurately the sub-genre Lovers to Relationship. Ruby and Sebastian have a strong physical relation right from the start but no long-term commitment. To be honest, I actually struggled with this book. Lily writes the story with dual POV and created great characters in Ruby and Sebastian. I quickly liked both of them because of their personalities and the chemistry they had with each other, in and out of the bedroom (which there is a lot of spice there!) As their extended time together starts to reveal the deeper connections between them, Ruby’s insecurities start to resurface, and a foreboding of sabotage starts to emerge. By that time Lily had already gotten my heart hooked on these two and I wasn’t sure I was up for any heartbreak. But I’ve been a fan of Lily’s for many years now so I trusted, that regardless of how we got there, she would deliver a happily-ever-after. I wasn’t disappointed and neither will you be!
As the first book in the new Coral Bay series What We Could Be has a great cast of supporting characters that Lily is already using to build the next book in the series, Where We Left US, set to release May 19, 2026.
Tanya’s love for books has been a lifelong passion that she likes sharing with others. Reading is also the thing that relaxes her after a day of juggling the many responsibilities that come with being being wife to an amazing man, mother to four great kids spread around the world, business manager, and farm hand on their place in southwest Missouri; home to Akaushi cattle and a menagerie of pygmy goats, horses, chickens, dogs and cats.
