Fake dating is one of romance’s most reliable pleasures, but it tends to work best when the reader can see the real relationship forming in the spaces the performance doesn’t cover. Liz Tomforde is extraordinarily good at this. The Right Move, the second book in her Windy City series, builds its fake relationship with such careful attention to those unperformed moments that by the time the characters are questioning what is real and what isn’t, the reader has long since stopped asking.
Ryan Shay is a professional basketball player who projects the image of a man who has it all figured out — and underneath that image is someone deeply private, working through something he hasn’t found the right way to talk about. Indy Ivers moves into his apartment out of necessity, and their arrangement — she lives there, they perform a relationship for reasons that become clear as the story progresses — starts as a negotiation and becomes something neither of them built into the terms. Tomforde builds their dynamic through the accumulation of small genuine moments: the way he is actually different from his public persona, the things she notices about him that he’s stopped noticing about himself, the conversations that start as utility and end somewhere else entirely.
The sports romance setting serves this story specifically because the gap between public performance and private reality is built into Ryan’s professional life. He is someone who has learned to present a version of himself, and Indy is one of the first people who has seen both versions simultaneously. That context gives the romance a layer of emotional meaning that purely domestic fake-dating stories often miss.
What Tomforde does that puts her above the field in this subgenre is write love interests who are genuinely complex without being complicated in a way that requires the plot to untangle them. Ryan’s private life has real weight, and it informs his behavior in ways that feel consistent and earned. You understand why he is the way he is. Understanding it makes everything that happens between him and Indy feel more consequential, not less.
The Windy City series benefits enormously from the audiobook format — Tomforde’s dual perspectives feel particularly alive when narrated, and the basketball world is rendered with enough technical texture to feel real without requiring any prior knowledge of the sport. Readers who found Icebreaker scratched a sports romance itch but wanted something with more emotional depth in the hero’s arc will find it here.
For readers new to the Windy City series, each book can be read independently, though the world becomes richer with each entry. The first book, Mile High, features a different central couple (and a different Chicago sports team), but the emotional intelligence that defines the series is consistent throughout. Readers who loved the forced proximity and slow-building intimacy in Things We Never Got Over will find that Tomforde is working in a very compatible register.
The right move of the title is not a basketball reference, though it could be. It is about the decision to stop pretending that what is happening between them is only what they agreed it would be. That decision, when Tomforde finally writes it, is fully earned. She made you wait for it, and the waiting was the right move too.