Love stories in the world as it is now: friends who finally say it, rivals stuck on the same project, small towns with one good cafe, and adults making a mess of a very good thing. 155 books carry this tag, across 22 series, plus 131 titles with no series listed.
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Rating coming soonSeth Quinn is finally home. His boyhood with a drug-addicted mother ended when the Quinn family took him in, and he grew up with three older brothers who watched over him. Now he returns from Europe as a successful painter to settle on Maryland's Eastern Shore among Cam, Ethan and Phillip, their wives and children. Much has changed in St. Christopher, and the most intriguing change is Dru Whitcomb Banks, a city woman with a new florist shop.
Rating coming soonKate has decided that she is finished with love. Her new boss, the features editor Eliot Holman, may have devastating charm and an obvious interest in her, but she could not care less. Everyone, Eliot included, assumes she is grieving for her husband, Toby, and she lets them believe it, keeping a guarded secret about how cruelly Toby treated her and how frightened she now is of trusting any man. Eliot refuses to leave her alone.
Rating coming soonIn four days Rena will marry Ford Harlow, and the thought of the ceremony fills her with excitement and dread at once. It is not an ordinary wedding. Their union is a deal: Ford wants her property, and Rena will do anything to keep it. If she is expecting a marriage of convenience in which they share a life but never a bed, she is in for a surprise, because Ford has been intrigued by his shy bride for a long time.
Rating coming soonBrianne Martin first sees Pierce Hutton in Paris, tall, handsome and utterly dangerous, and she pulls him back from despair without intending to. He is grateful for the rest of his life, but he draws the line at seducing a woman half his age. She falls in love with him anyway, and refuses to consider giving her innocence to anyone else, least of all the corrupt associate of her stepfather, who is obsessed with her and would stop at nothing to have her.
Rating coming soonLuke Tanner's parting words on their first evening together sounded more like a threat than a promise to Amy Warren. Four years after tragedy ended her marriage she is still hurting, and still terrified of loving anyone again. As a partner in a tour company that organises trips through the South African countryside, she is forced to work with him.
Rating coming soonPersepha cannot believe it when her beloved guardian dies suddenly. Perhaps it is the numbness of grief that makes her listen to Don Diablo Ezreldo Ruy, her guardian's friend, when he announces that he intends to marry her. She protests that she does not love him, and he assures her that love will come. All too soon she understands that what he actually wants from her is a child.
Rating coming soonMeeting Torr Latime is the last thing Abby Lyndon expected from a Japanese flower-arranging class, and he is dynamic, good-looking and better at arrangements than she is. He is also the distraction she needs, because someone is stalking her. Once Torr understands her situation he offers to protect her, taking her to his secluded cabin, where the atmosphere is intimate and safe and, it turns out, conducive to seduction.
Rating coming soonOn the face of it Grace Wilde has everything: youth, beauty, wealth and a title. Everything that makes up the life of a society queen is hers, and happiness is the one thing missing. The social round was never her choice; she was coerced into a loveless and meaningless marriage with an uncaring, unfaithful man. Then, on an expedition into the Persian desert, she falls into the hands of Kharim Khan, who is unlike anyone she has met.
Rating coming soonEdwin Trequair professes to live by an Eastern saying: that a woman's mind is a jungle, and the one jungle in which a man should never lose himself. Yet he has asked Heron to marry him, and she has accepted, which neither of them can fully explain. He has money and the house that has meant everything to Heron all her life, the Glass Castle. What she feels for him is closer to fear and curiosity than affection.
Rating coming soonSixteen-year-old Simon Spier is not openly gay and prefers to keep his drama for the school musical. When an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of becoming public, and he finds himself being blackmailed: if he does not act as wingman for the class clown, Martin, his identity will become everyone's business. Worse, the privacy of Blue, the boy he has been emailing, would be compromised too.
Rating coming soonShe is an aspiring interior designer who dreams of falling in love. He is an ex-football star who thinks love is a con. Blake and Farrah should not have fallen for each other the way they did, completely and irrevocably, because they are studying abroad in Shanghai and they have only one year, and because forces at home threaten to separate them before either is ready.
Rating coming soonJohnny Kavanagh has been living a different life since an injury sidelined him, and he has never known a life without his number 13 jersey. Shannon Lynch has always been good at keeping secrets, and after a traumatising trip to Dublin she is trying to protect her little brothers above all else. There is only one boy who can pull her out of the shadows she is retreating into, and secrets are about to be revealed.
Rating coming soonHome on leave after destroying a Colombian drug cartel, the Navy SEAL Clint McIntire finds himself in serious trouble with Morganna Chavez, the younger sister of his best friend. She has been working secretly with the Drug Enforcement Administration to uncover a lucrative and deadly conspiracy involving a date-rape drug, and the operation has put her in danger that he is not prepared for.
Rating coming soonRoman DeWinter arrives at a seaside inn with nothing but the clothes he is wearing and a loaded revolver. His orders are to expose a criminal organisation based at the holiday retreat, and the evidence points to the innkeeper, Charity Ford. It should be a routine assignment, and then he learns what it is to be welcomed into a home, and starts to care for his own suspect.
Rating coming soonLori Loveland knows her faith will help her reach her goals, and when she finishes a six-month stint as nanny to Drew McCashlin's daughters she intends to begin her own adventure. Once she has met the single father she realises she is in trouble, and she begins to wish that the six months could last a lifetime. Drew, after a tragedy, sees her as a source of light.
Rating coming soonJustine Campbell would gladly rewind her life a few months, to the time before it crumbled around her. Billy Tucker would take the same option, going back to the day before his vehicle was blown up in Iraq, injuring him and killing two of his friends. His bitterness and her humiliation make them a prickly pair when they first meet, and both have to let go of the past.
Rating coming soonMeg Jorgenson wants a fresh start after a failed relationship, so she takes a teaching position in the town of Miracle, Kentucky and vows to avoid smooth-talking men. There she meets eight-year-old Cammy, who uses a wheelchair and is certain that God will heal her, and Cammy's widowed father Vance, who has devoted his life to her care. Then an experimental procedure divides them.
Rating coming soonOne moment Lauri had been a ballet student living quietly with her aunt in Downhollow, and the next a tall, dark ballet master had walked into her life. Carried off by Maxim di Corte to his Venetian palace, she becomes a slave to the dance, and through him she begins to understand the feeling behind real balletic expression.
Rating coming soonWhen Rory O'Fallon finds a baby girl on his front porch, he is determined to find her mother, and that means calling his sons home to O'Fallon's Landing. Keefe O'Fallon is the newest face on a soap opera, but family comes first, and escaping the press to the backwaters of the Mississippi seems like a good answer until he meets the woman caring for the baby and discovers she is not the nanny at all.
Rating coming soonSimoni knows she will never get on with Kent Travers. He is a pilot and so holds authority over her, and he is tyrannical and unreasonable about it. Worse, competent as she generally is, every time she comes near Captain Travers she manages to make some particularly stupid mistake. She is relieved that they will both soon be leaving the airline, except that their paths keep crossing.
Rating coming soonLiz never particularly wanted to marry, having a low opinion of men, and she certainly did not want to marry the half-Greek Nigel Shapani. Yet she finds herself settled in his house in Delphi. Under the terms of an eccentric will, two family fortunes would be lost if the two of them did not marry, and her elderly relatives needed the money. She is determined to keep it a business arrangement only.
Rating coming soonWhen Emma Hanson's young friend dies as a single mother and leaves baby Mandy in Emma's care, the town of Roswell takes sides. Most of the men say she cannot manage it, since she has a restaurant to run, but the townswomen rally to help. When a councilman plots to take the child away, Emma is forced to act, and she places an advertisement for a mail-order husband.
Rating coming soonThe ability to manipulate time has come in useful for Caleb Edge in his career as a T-FLAC operative, and his current assignment is to get close to Heather Shaw in order to find her banker father and forty-eight billion dollars of missing terrorist funds. The difficulty is that Heather has been in hiding for a year and does not know where he is.
Rating coming soonReturning to Segundo, Colorado, was the last thing Tori Sandoval planned to do. She had overcome the odds facing a girl from a small coal-mining town to become a high-school principal in the city, but now her grandparents need her help. She cannot understand why the widower Steve Remington would move to a place like this with his children, and then he turns out to be her employee.
Rating coming soonMaya Killgore is twenty-three and has not worked out what she wants from her life when she meets Conor Harkness, a man twelve years older with a way of doing things that gets on her nerves. The novel follows the two of them through a summer in Italy and the problem of wanting something that looks like a mistake.
Rating coming soonSloane Hart is in her senior year of college in 2016 and has decided to keep things simple, which lasts until she meets Ethan Brady. The two of them settle into something that is not quite a relationship, and the novel follows the year that arrangement takes to fall apart and what Sloane does afterwards.
Rating coming soonOlivia Marshall loses her job and discovers that her boyfriend has been unfaithful, and then sets her apartment building on fire while burning his letters. She moves into her brother's flat and finds that his oldest friend Colin Beck lives there too, and then a wrong-number message turns into the best relationship she has.
Rating coming soonA collection made up of the novella Paris for One and eight other stories. In the title piece, Nell is twenty-six, has never been abroad on a romantic weekend and is waiting in Paris for a boyfriend who does not arrive, which leaves her with a city, a hotel room and nobody to share either with.
Rating coming soonThe narrator has just moved into a house with her brother and two of his friends, one of whom is Colin Fitzgerald, a hockey-playing student who has decided that she is flighty and superficial. She is not interested in chasing anybody, but the two of them are living under the same roof with an attraction neither will admit to.
Rating coming soonOlivia Lockheart is a judge in the small town of Cedar Cove, and she has just refused a young couple's divorce on the grounds that they have not tried hard enough to stay married. While the town argues about it, her daughter Justine is deciding whether to stop waiting for love, and her friend Grace is watching her marriage come apart.
Rating coming soonKennedy is the only woman on the medical staff of a professional baseball team and is trying to keep her reputation intact for one more season. A night in Las Vegas leaves her with a ring on her hand and a husband she barely knows, and the two of them have to pretend it was planned.
Rating coming soonHazel finds a coded message hidden inside a book in the shop where she works, and then more of them. Following the trail of clues needs a second person, and the one who volunteers is Noah, a fisherman who has been coming into the bookstore for months for reasons he has not mentioned.
Rating coming soonAugust Landry moves to New York expecting to be proved right about the world, and instead falls for a woman she keeps meeting on the subway. Jane is a punk from the 1970s who has been displaced in time and cannot leave the train, and August decides to find out why.
Rating coming soonHank Mallone needs a bank loan for his business, and he has decided that the reason he keeps being turned down is his reputation as a rogue. His solution is to hire a wife to improve it, and the woman who answers his advertisement turns out to be nothing like the quiet, respectable figure he had in mind.
Rating coming soonHelen Decatur has spent her working life reaching goals, and she has met every one of them: college, law school, her own practice, financial security and a reputation as one of the most respected divorce lawyers in South Carolina. The one thing she has decided she wants now is the thing she has left latest, and it is harder than the rest.
Rating coming soonHolly has just finished nursing school and cannot afford to be distracted by anything, because she believes that a mistake on her part could cost a patient's life. When she meets Matthew Cook, a baker she knew in high school but never noticed at the time, she has to decide whether she can risk letting anyone get close to her again.
Rating coming soonDani Phillips loves her job as the city manager of Magnolia Bay, Mississippi, and she loves the community she works for. When the town council decides to spend money on a campaign to attract tourists and rescue the local economy, she keeps her reservations to herself, until she meets the man hired to sell her town to strangers.
Rating coming soonLauren Carlyle is a schoolteacher who meets a tall stranger across a crowded ballroom and is swept into a dance, and then into an evening neither of them intends to repeat. Afterwards they go their separate ways, until she finds out that the man she danced with is going to be living under the same roof.
Rating coming soonMaggie West has wanted a family of her own for as long as she can remember, and her new neighbour, a single father named Kellen Ashby, is not the man she had in mind to provide one. His daughters are exactly the sort of children she used to imagine having, and he has just inherited the inn she manages.
Rating coming soonGlory Parsons dreads going home for the holidays. Her brother was killed in a war, and Jesse Bainbridge was lost to her through her own weakness: she left him abruptly ten years earlier after promising to love him forever, and she never told him why. Jesse is now the sheriff of Pearl Lake and responsible for his orphaned niece, and he has no intention of getting involved with her again.
Rating coming soonAlethea is desperate to leave home, where her mother, her sister and three young nieces are driving her to distraction, so the arrival of Trent de Havilland in her life is a relief. Then he suggests that she move in with him, which is more than she bargained for. She hardly knows him, and she is wary of a man who makes her feel the way he does. The arrangement is part of the deal if he is to help her sister.
Rating coming soonRuth Kauffman is shy, and she is delighted when Charles Polk asks her out: he is handsome, hard-working and genuinely interested in her. There is one complication, which is that Charles and his parents are not Mennonite, though they are seriously considering joining her church in Sarasota and taking up a simple life. Some members of the congregation refuse to accept them, and then disaster strikes Charles's family.
Rating coming soonMaggie Turner takes her child to her godmother's ranch near Abilene, hoping to get away from her ex-husband's threats for a while. The plan would have worked if Gabe Coleman were not there: ten years on, he is as blunt, as rude and as unsettling as he was when she knew him before. She had thought her marriage cured her of wanting anybody, and Gabe's presence tests that.
Rating coming soonWhen Brent Akerman announces that he intends to close down his chain of fashion accessory shops, somebody has to ask him to reconsider, and Crystal is elected to do it. He is open to suggestions and does not soften his answers, and it becomes clear that he likes her, respects her work and wants to hire her for other projects. It is also clear that he would not mind mixing business with pleasure.
Rating coming soonAfter her husband's death, Kate Long moves with her young daughter to the Australian mountain town of Ferntree Heights and sets out to build a new life for the two of them. She is unsettled by Aaron Frazer, a successful entrepreneur and a man of faith, who takes a romantic interest in her. Kate wants the warmth he offers, and tells herself she does not deserve it.
Rating coming soonFourteen years ago a fire injured Shelby Beck and burned down Goose Harbor's only church, and she is now planning to rebuild both the building and her life. Her wounds have always kept her at a distance from men. When Joel Palermo returns to town as a fireman and is assigned to help her raise money for the new building, she is surprised by how easy it is to get close to her brother's old friend.
Rating coming soonTanner Bohlman works for the Forest Service and knows the dangers of Idaho's land and rivers, and he does not think it is any place for a woman like Zoe Lawton, even if she is a capable marine biologist. Zoe is new in town and could use a guide. When Tanner finds that her young son has never been fishing, he steps into the role of a father figure, and finds himself rethinking a vow never to love again.
Rating coming soonArianna Kent's last spoken words were heard by a 911 operator telling them that her parents were dead. She and her brother Simon are now in hiding, grieving and afraid of the killer who is still at large, and since her discovery of the murder Ari has been unable to speak. Mitch Ellis, a psychiatrist, is intrigued by her condition, and he has secrets of his own.
Contemporary romance is a tag, not a genre. It marks the romance novels where the world around the relationship is the modern real one: no magic, no invented kingdoms and no court politics, but phones, jobs, rent, families and commutes doing their part as the obstacle course. Every book with this tag sits on the romance shelf.
Historical romance and romantasy do not fall under this tag, because their settings carry as much weight as the relationship does, and a book can be a romance here without the tag when it is set in the past or in a world that does not exist.
The tag covers romantic comedy, small town, sports, workplace, second chance and queer romance, from the established names to books published this decade.
Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.
70 booksPrimary genreThe love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
155 of this tagPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
1 of this tagPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
5 of this tagReviews for these books are signed by Baby Bat, one book at a time. Until a review is written the book page says so rather than guessing at an opinion.
