As Shane and Ilya return for Season 2 of Heated Rivalry, the stakes will be higher for the happy couple.

Series creator Jacob Tierney recently teased that the source material, Rachel Reid’s The Long Game, is “an emotionally sophisticated book that takes this couple seriously,” set 10 years after the events of the Heated Rivalry book.

“It really is different, and the challenge, from an adaptation standpoint, is you’re in much more serious territory,” he explained at BookCon 2026, according to Entertainment Weekly. “There’s still lots of flirting, and there’s lots of sex, but it’s this kind of danger. This kind of ‘hotel room, adolescent sex’ stuff is largely gone.”

The sixth book in Reid’s Game Changer series, The Long Game follows Shane and Ilya a decade into their relationship, which is still kept a secret, despite Ilya wanting to take their romance public.

“What do you do after the rush of danger is gone and yet now you have to live in a relationship where you still aren’t communicating properly, much as you would like to?” added Tierney. “You can say you love each other, but as adults know, there’s so much more than that to make a relationship successful. And that is what they’re learning.”

Tierney recently told Deadline there’s “a lot of material” to work with for Season 2, suggesting the book might be split into two seasons.

“When I talked to Rachel for the first time about Heated Rivalry, I wanted to take this seriously because I think that’s what this material deserves. There’s a version of it that’s pulpy and soapy, but I wanted to take it seriously because I am really transfixed by this relationship,” he explained. “Part of what transfixed me was knowing where it was going with The Long Game. Rachel took them very seriously, and these little tidbits in the first book become real issues for them [later].”