Sugarlake Books in Order

The Sugarlake books are Emily McIntire's interconnected small-town romances, and they feel very different from Never After. The heat is still there, but the heart of the series is family, history, and the way one Tennessee town can hold onto people even when they try to leave.

Sugarlake remembers everything.

The series starts with Beneath the Stars, where Alina Carson and Chase Adams grow from a childhood connection into a messy, hard-earned love story. That book lays down the emotional map for the whole run: siblings, best friends, old hurts, and the sense that everyone knows just enough about each other to make leaving complicated. Love is never happening in a vacuum here. It is happening in full view of the people who remember every bad decision.

From there, the books widen out. Beneath the Stands follows Eli Carson and Becca Sanger through basketball dreams, old anger, and years of unfinished business. Beneath the Hood steps away from town for part of the action, but it stays tied to the larger circle as Jackson and Blakely deal with fame, loneliness, and an off-limits age-gap romance. Beneath the Surface brings Lily back into focus and closes the emotional loop with a story about survival, secrets, and learning to trust again.

What makes the setting matter is that Sugarlake is not just a postcard small town. It is the place where these characters were shaped, hurt, loved, judged, and, in a lot of cases, misunderstood. Church expectations, family reputation, hometown gossip, and long memory all press on the romances. Even when characters move away, the town keeps pulling on the thread. That is a big part of why the books feel interconnected even when each one has its own central couple.

The tone is angsty contemporary romance. Expect second chances, best friend's brother tension, forbidden attraction, addiction recovery, hidden pain, and people carrying wounds for a very long time. McIntire writes these books with more softness than her darkest work, but she still likes messy emotions and couples who have to earn their way back to each other. Nobody gets an easy ride.

Read them for the feeling that everyone is broken in a slightly different way, and love might still be enough.

The author has said the books can work on their own, but they land best in order if you want the full effect: Beneath the Stars, Beneath the Stands, Beneath the Hood, then Beneath the Surface. Characters cross in and out of each other's stories, and the payoffs hit harder when you have watched the whole town, and this extended found family, change a little from book to book.