Amy Daws has carved out a distinctive niche in contemporary romance with her Mountain Men Matchmaker series, and Honeymoon Phase, the third installment featuring Luke Fletcher, delivers exactly what readers crave from this author: laugh-out-loud humor, deeply emotional character work, and relationships that feel refreshingly authentic despite their outrageous premises. This friends-to-lovers, marriage-of-convenience romance tackles grief, family dysfunction, and the terrifying vulnerability of falling in love with someone who already knows all your secrets.
The setup is pure romantic comedy gold. Addison “Roe” Monroe, a capable lumberyard manager more comfortable driving a forklift than attending galas, faces an archaic trust stipulation: marry or lose her late father’s business to outside buyers. When she announces plans to husband-hunt at the local lumberjack competition, her best friend Luke Fletcher decides desperate times call for desperate measures. His solution? Transform himself from mild-mannered lumber supplier into a competition-ready lumberjack and propose a marriage of convenience.
There’s just one complication Luke conveniently forgets to mention: he’s hopelessly, desperately, completely in love with his best friend. And has been for years.
Mountain Magic and Matchmaking Mayhem
For readers new to this series, Honeymoon Phase works as a standalone while rewarding longtime fans with deep connections to previous books. The Mountain Men Matchmaker series began with Nine Month Contract, featuring eldest brother Wyatt’s unconventional path to fatherhood through a surrogacy arrangement that became so much more. Seven Year Itch continued with middle brother Calder finally admitting his feelings for Dakota after years of antagonistic attraction. Now Luke, the youngest Fletcher brother, gets his turn in the spotlight.
The real mastermind behind all three brothers finding love? Their college-aged niece Everly, who deserves her own book (conveniently scheduled as Book 4: Bad Boy Era, releasing in 2026). Everly’s fingerprints are all over Luke’s lumberjack transformation, from creating grueling workout regimens to constructing elaborate training programs involving boom walking, speed chopping, and pole climbing. Watching Luke subject himself to months of physical torture while his brothers and their uncle put him through his paces provides some of the novel’s funniest moments.
The Fletcher family compound on their Colorado mountain serves as more than just setting—it’s a character unto itself. Daws has built a world readers want to inhabit, where three brothers live in adjacent cabins, where Sunday dinners bring everyone together, and where a pet rooster named Rufus has claimed Luke’s porch as his territory. The found-family aspect resonates throughout, particularly poignant given both Luke and Addison’s complicated relationships with their biological families.
The Anatomy of a Fake Marriage (That Fools Absolutely Nobody)
What elevates Honeymoon Phase above standard marriage-of-convenience fare is Daws’s refusal to let her characters exist in a vacuum of denial. From the moment Luke and Addison courthouse-marry in a whirlwind ceremony, everyone around them can see what they themselves refuse to acknowledge: this marriage stopped being fake approximately five minutes after they said “I do.”
The transition from friends to roommates to something indefinably more unfolds with delicious slowness. Daws excels at the small moments—Luke cooking steak and potatoes for Addison’s homecoming, the weight of his arm helping her sleep through the night, their “fact or fiction” game that becomes a language of intimacy only they share. These quiet domestic scenes carry more eroticism than many explicit love scenes because Daws understands that for friends crossing into romantic territory, every touch carries the weight of potentially ruining everything.
The author’s signature humor shines in unexpected places. The Fletcher family’s excitement over wedding planning, complete with Luke’s mother Jo and her detailed binder, creates comedy gold as Addison—who has never dreamed of a wedding—finds herself swept into bridal fittings and flower selections. The bridesmaids shopping scene, featuring Luke’s sisters-in-law rallying around Addison with Fireball shots and fierce protectiveness, demonstrates Daws’s skill at writing female friendship that feels genuine.
Grief, Growth, and the Ghosts We Carry
Beneath the humor and heat, Honeymoon Phase grapples with substantial emotional territory. Both protagonists carry profound losses that shape their fears about love. Luke lost his father three years prior, and that death transformed him in ways he’s only beginning to understand. The weight of holding his father during those final moments created a terror of losing people he loves.
Addison’s trauma runs deeper and darker. The loss of her younger brother Aaron in childhood, combined with her mother’s subsequent imprisonment for drunk driving and permanent abandonment of the family, has left Addison convinced she’s fundamentally unequipped for normal relationships. Her runs through the cemetery where Aaron is buried reveal a woman who understands grief as a constant companion rather than something to overcome.
Daws handles these heavy themes with remarkable grace, never letting them overwhelm the romance but also never treating them as mere backstory. When Addison finally opens up to Luke about watching her mother drive away without even a goodbye after serving her prison sentence, the scene lands with devastating emotional honesty. Luke’s response—simply holding her and saying “she missed out”—captures everything beautiful about their relationship.
The parallel between Luke’s fear of losing people and Addison’s fear of being abandoned creates the central conflict that threatens their happiness. When Addison discovers that Luke has been in love with her for years, that their marriage was never truly a convenience for him, her immediate reaction is to feel deceived. The layers of this conflict reveal Daws’s sophisticated understanding of how trauma shapes our responses.
The Lumberjack Games: Absurdity Meets Authenticity
The lumberjack competition sequences could have been pure slapstick, but Daws plays them straight enough to keep readers invested while mining them for both comedy and character development. Watching Luke attempt boom walking, speed chopping, and ninety-foot pole climbing becomes a metaphor for the lengths we’ll go to for love.
The training montages remain engaging because Daws focuses on Luke’s internal journey alongside his physical transformation. Each bruise, each failure, each small victory builds not just his lumberjack skills but his confidence that he deserves to fight for what he wants.
When the Fake Becomes Frighteningly Real
The book’s strongest sequences occur after Luke and Addison begin living together on Fletcher Mountain. Daws captures the specific intimacy of cohabitation with someone who knows you completely yet whom you’re experiencing in entirely new contexts. Simple moments—Luke leaving Addison’s favorite bread on the counter, Addison curling into Luke’s arms at night—accumulate until the line between performance and reality dissolves entirely.
The sex scenes balance heat with emotional resonance. Daws doesn’t shy away from explicit content, but she never loses sight of who these characters are and what sex means within their specific relationship. Their first time together carries the weight of years of friendship, months of living as a married couple, and the terrifying knowledge that this changes everything.
The wedding ceremony itself, with its improvised “fact or fiction” vows, provides the perfect conclusion to their journey. When Addison starts with “Fact or fiction: I’m a fool” and Luke refuses to agree, then continues with “Fact or fiction: I love you,” the payoff feels earned. Luke’s answering vows—”Forever my arms are yours, Addison, because I will love you forever”—callback to his earlier role as the literal and emotional weight that helps her sleep.
Areas Where the Foundation Cracks Slightly
Despite its considerable strengths, Honeymoon Phase has some weaknesses. The pacing sags noticeably in the middle section, with too many repetitive scenes of Luke training or Addison working at the lumberyard. The conflict around Addison’s father selling the lumberyard feels somewhat contrived and resolves too quickly to carry much weight.
Addison’s character arc, while emotionally authentic, sometimes tips into frustrating territory. Her constant push-pull with Luke makes psychological sense given her trauma but can feel repetitive. The “fact or fiction” catchphrase, while charming initially, gets overused to the point of becoming gimmicky.
For Fans Of: Finding Your Reading Companions
Readers who enjoyed Honeymoon Phase will find similar pleasures in:
- It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey – Fish-out-of-water romance with found family dynamics
- The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren – Fake-relationship energy with genuinely funny moments
- The Hating Game by Sally Thorne – Workplace tension hiding deeper feelings
- Beach Read by Emily Henry – Friends-to-lovers with past traumas
- Well Met by Jen DeLuca – Small-town romance finding community after loss
- The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez – Friends-to-lovers dealing with serious challenges while maintaining humor
The Verdict: Love Disguised As Convenience
Honeymoon Phase succeeds as both romantic comedy and emotional journey because Amy Daws understands that the best love stories aren’t about people completing each other—they’re about people who are already complete finding someone worth opening up for anyway.
The novel’s greatest strength lies in its central relationship. Luke and Addison feel like actual friends with years of history, not strangers manufacturing chemistry. Their banter flows naturally, their conflicts make sense, and their path from platonic to romantic unfolds with satisfying inevitability. Daws has created two people readers genuinely want to see happy together.
The Fletcher Mountain setting and extended family provide delightful texture without overwhelming the central love story. The intergenerational wisdom from Luke’s mother Jo and the found-family acceptance Addison discovers create emotional resonance that elevates the story beyond simple rom-com territory.
Is Honeymoon Phase perfect? No. The pacing stumbles, some plot points feel manufactured, and certain phrases get overused. But perfection isn’t what makes romance novels memorable—connection is. By the final page, when Luke and Addison stand married not just legally but emotionally, readers will believe in their happiness because these two have earned it through vulnerability, growth, and the courage to risk their friendship for something greater.
For readers seeking romance that balances genuine humor with emotional depth, that treats grief and joy as co-habitants of real life, that understands best friends make the most terrifying and rewarding lovers, Honeymoon Phase offers exactly what its title promises: that glorious period where everything feels new and perfect and worth fighting for.
