She asks the hard questions. He’s the answer she wasn’t looking for.

Charlotte Yates has spent seven years as Clearwater’s most trusted journalist, fair, precise, and impossible to charm. She covers the town with the kind of sustained attention that earns respect and keeps everyone at a safe distance. The distance is the point. Charlotte learned long ago that closeness and credibility don’t coexist, and she’s built her entire life around the principle.

Then the school board hires Dean Mercer.

Dean is Clearwater’s new athletic director, a former minor-league ballplayer with a talent for building programmes and a track record of leaving before they’re finished. He’s smart, competent, and careful in a way that Charlotte recognises, because it’s the same kind of careful she is: the kind that protects something vulnerable underneath.

Their jobs make them unavoidable. Charlotte is assigned to cover Dean’s rollout of a school-and-community athletics partnership. Dean must earn the town’s trust while a sharp-eyed reporter documents every move he makes. The professional friction is immediate. The respect is reluctant. The attraction is the thing neither of them planned for.

But Clearwater is a small town with a long memory, and the line between covering someone’s story and becoming part of it is thinner than Charlotte wants to admit. When a budget controversy and Dean’s complicated past collide, Charlotte faces the hardest choice of her career: the truth that protects her principles, or the honesty that might cost her everything she’s built, including the man she’s fallen for.

Crossed Lines is a slow-burn workplace romance about two people who are excellent at reading everyone else and terrified of being truly seen by each other.

Book 3 in the Under the Lights series. Interconnected standalone, no cliffhanger, complete love story. Moderate heat.