No More Secrets is a contemporary, small-town romance by Lucy Score. This is the first book in the Blue Moon series. This isn’t a book review but an actual summary of what happens in the story, so keep in mind there will be spoilers ahead.
No More Secrets opens with Summer Lentz arriving at Carter Pierce’s farm for a week to write a story about it. She has dinner with him, his mom Phoebe, his brother Beckett, and the farm’s horse trainer, Joey. Every time Carter and Summer touch, there is a little jolt of electricity. The next morning, Carter takes Summer on a tour of the farm. The goat, Clementine, eats part of her jeans, she rides a horse for the first time, and she pets the farm’s pigs. In the afternoon, she harvests lettuce with Carter, Beckett, and the farm hand, Colby, for three hours. It’s backbreaking work, and Summer surprises all of them by not quitting. After she is in a lot of pain, so Carter gives her a backrub. They go out to buy boots better equipped for farm work and to get dinner and half the town starts to try to matchmake them.
Carter’s estranged brother, Jax, shows up at five am, and the two get into a fight. Jax says he went to Phoebe’s house first and that there was a man there, probably the same one Carter and Summer heard about through the Blue Moon gossip train. Along with Beckett, they go to Phoebe’s house to confront her and Franklin. Summer discovers that there is a Blue Moon gossip Facebook group, which is how Jackson knew about her and her blog. She and Carter are all over it. Back on the farm, Clementine eats Jax’s pants, so he and Summer go into town to buy new clothes, drink a wheatgrass shot, and pick up lunch. Jax is back because he saw Joey on Summer’s blog and realized it was time to come home to her. Despite its idiosyncrasies, Summer is coming to like Blue Moon—and Carter. She makes Carter a logo for the farm. He reads her blog and finds he really loves her writing. He has trouble reconciling the blog with the writing she does for the magazine Indulgence.
The next day, Summer has lunch with Beckett. Beckett is a lawyer who does divorce mediations and the town’s mayor. He is definitely the most stable of the brothers and ends up fielding several tiny mayoral “issues” during their lunch, all with grace and a sense of humor. When Carter picks her up, Summer tells him that she likes Beckett and misses his unhappiness. Back at the farm, Carter watches her field a ton of calls about issues at the magazine, ranging from a client unhappy with their ad placement to her best friend, Nikolai, not getting a copy of the article he was shooting for. Carter makes her stop working and takes her for a sunset horseback ride. Summer realizes there is something to the quiet pace and hard work of farm life.
On Saturday, she and Phoebe run the produce pick-up day and learn another local farmer broke his leg and can’t harvest his own crops. The whole town turns out to help him harvest. Summer slips away from the crowd to call her mom, which ends up being a rough conversation. Carter finds him, and she tells him that her dad was disappointed when she switched to digital journalism and focused on magazines in college, to the point where he cut off her school funding. He was an old-school journalist for The New York Times and wanted her to follow in his footsteps. They’ve barely spoken in years, and she feels like she doesn’t have a community. Carter tells her about how after he came back from Afghanistan and left the Army, he struggled with PTSD and needed every ounce of support he could get from the community. They kiss and then go back to Carter’s house and have sex. Carter has a nightmare, and they have sex again. Both realize this is more than a fling. They decide to try to figure out a relationship.
Everyone else can tell they’re together. Joey and Summer go out. They’re accosted by the local reporter/gossip hound, and he tries his best to get a story out of Summer. She and Joey leave. They get to know each other better over dinner once safe from gossipers. Carter plays poker with his brothers and Franklin. Jax wants to start a brew pub with his brothers. The next day is Summer’s last full day there. In the evening, they have dinner with Carter’s family one last time, and she gives them all shirts with a farm logo she made.
Once Summer is back in New York, she makes time to call Carter, and they meet several times. One time, after her train is late and she misses meetings at work, she decides she needs to refocus. She is, after all, in a cutthroat industry. Carter comes to visit her for a weekend. He attends a fashion show with Summer, and her coworkers and boss all like him, primarily for his looks. He confronts a model who gropes Summer and confesses later that he didn’t enjoy the evening aside from the chance to watch Summer work. He asks why she works for a magazine like Indulgence when it’s clear that her journalistic interests are elsewhere, and she explains that the job is a stepping stone to help her learn the industry and make contacts so she can start her own digital magazine. They spend the weekend together, exploring New York. He has a nightmare and explains he has PTSD from getting shot directly after seeing a seven-year-old girl being murdered. They say they love each other.
Summer isn’t able to make it back to Blue Moon until the planned photo shoot for the article she wrote. She helps out at the farmer’s market and is jealous of the sense of belonging each member of the Pierce family has. Niko arrives to take the photographs. The next day, they run a farm tour for the local daycare. Carter offhandedly mentions wanting kids with Summer, and she freaks out, running to Joey to ask if Carter wants a family. Summer is uncomfortable because of her own family history and almost tells Joey she can’t have kids before she leaves again. She decides that she and Carter aren’t going to work out because one of them will have to give up everything to make their relationship work. She finds Carter and tells him that their relationship won’t work because she won’t ask him to give up the farm, and she can’t give up on her own dreams. She begs him to let her go. He says he loves her and that he wants the opportunity to truly know her. She runs into Beckett, who is concerned, and blurts out that Carter wouldn’t want her if he knew the truth—or worse, would feel obligated to stay. She asks Beckett to tell Niko she had to go.
Carter’s family rallies around him to keep him busy and make sure he knows he’s supported. Niko tells Carter that Summer is very close-lipped about her secret and that he found out on his own—and even then, she still isn’t happy he knows. Carter asks Niko to keep her safe. Niko heads back to the city. Carter and Beckett agree to start a brewery with Jax as long as he stays this time.
Back in the city, Summer buries herself in work but she doesn’t feel the same pleasure in it she one did. Niko thinks she should go back to Blue Moon because he’s never seen her that happy. Summer has been in remission from cancer for six months but is terrified of it returning. It also may have rendered her infertile. When she was sick, she hid it from everyone. At the end of the summer, she’ll have more tests done to see if she is still in remission. She goes to a benefit, and when she gets home, she has an email from Niko with the Blue Moon photos. Seeing Carter in them makes her heart hurt. One photo is of her and Carter, looking deeply happy and in love.
Summer gets the published copy of Indulgence and is shocked to find her story about organic farming replaced by one entirely about how hot Carter is. Summer confronts her boss, Katherine, over it, who says that it’s what readers want. She tells Summer to either hand over Carter’s contact information or gets used to being a copy editor again. Summer quits. She double-checks with legal on the way out that her blog is still all hers—it is. She writes an honest blog post about falling in love, her cancer, and her disconnect from the New York magazine lifestyle and its glossy falsehoods. Then she apologizes to Carter for running away and for the article Indulgence published. She also posts her original version of the article with the photos she took while she was there.
Everyone at her oncologists read her blog and wants to know if she’s heard from Carter. Once she gets out of the appointment, Carter is waiting for her. She’s cancer-free. He also doesn’t even know if he wants a family and doesn’t care she’s possibly infertile.
Summer’s blog post gets a ton of attention, including from advertisers interested in working with her if she sets up a wellness digital magazine. She moves in with Carter and starts cultivating a healthier work-life balance. Summer’s parents come to visit in their RV. She’s thrilled to see them and start rebuilding her relationship with them.
In the epilogue, Carter and Summer are married and have twins. Phoebe has married Franklin, and they built a house on the farm big enough for the whole family to come visit. Both the farm and digital magazine are doing well. Summer is also five years cancer-free. Carter plans a romantic evening for the two of them to celebrate because the occasionally messy, often chaotic life they’ve built matters so much to him.
No More Secrets by Lucy Score. Carter Pierce wants to spend his days tending the family farm he inherited, and that’s about it. After a tour of duty and a few bullet holes, he’s looking forward to some peace and quiet in his hometown.
Unfortunately for the sexy, bearded farmer, hippie-dippie Blue Moon doesn’t believe in peace and quiet. And his nosy neighbors sure as hell don’t know how to mind their own business.
Neither does the big city journalist who arrives to interview him for a magazine article. Summer Lentz is out of place with her designer wardrobe and workaholic schedule. She asks too many questions and gets under his skin with her smart mouth and those denim-blue eyes.
Now she’s typing his family’s story a mile a minute at his kitchen table and sleeping in the bedroom across the hall. His only option is to scare her away from farm life so he can go back to his nice, solitary life.
But Summer’s got a stubborn streak and secrets of her own. And once Carter starts pulling at those threads, he’s not so eager to send her packing. Will a nudge from the matchmaking Beautification Committee result in a happily ever after or a homegrown disaster?
