Million Kisses in Your Lifetime

Monica Murphy set Million Kisses in Your Lifetime inside the Lancaster Prep world she had already built across several novels, which is why a standalone can arrive with a school, a social order and a set of families already in place. The book was published in 2022 and follows the same pattern as the rest of that series: a wealthy boarding-school setting, a pair who begin as opponents, and a plot that turns on what one of them has decided in secret.

Wren Beaumont is the girl the school has agreed to admire: pretty, polite, academically serious, and entirely closed off about her own life. Crew Lancaster is the boy who has decided that the admiration is a performance and who sets about collecting evidence. The class project that throws them together is a device rather than a plot twist, and the novel uses it to move the two of them from open hostility into a relationship neither of them has explained to their families or their friends.

The book is written in the manner of the new adult romance that grew out of online recommendation rather than print reviews, and it takes its readers' familiarity with the subgenre for granted: the social hierarchy, the private-school scandal and the heroine who has been underestimated are all part of the contract. It is one of several Lancaster Prep novels and can be read without the others.