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Abby Jimenez seems to understand that falling in love is rarely the most complicated part of a relationship. The best romance writers are interested in everything that makes love difficult to act upon: illness, grief, family obligation, financial pressure, bad timing and the habits people develop while trying to survive. In The Night We Met, Jimenez adds loyalty to that list, then asks how noble loyalty remains when protecting one person begins to harm everyone else.

Declan’s strongest material lies outside the romance. His father has spent years treating football success as both destiny and obligation. Declan’s identity becomes inseparable from athletic achievement, public admiration and the belief that he must reach the NFL to justify everyone’s investment in him.

As someone who has never read any of Liz Tomforde’s Windy City novels, I went into this one with absolutely no idea what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that this is an incredibly emotionally intuitive and thoughtful book.

Make Me ended up being my favourite book in the entire Broke & Beautiful series, not because it's the most original, or the most complex. But because what it does do is give us something that romance novels often chase but don't always manage to achieve: absolute conviction.

And yet here we are! Because somehow Tessa Bailey took a premise that should have had me rolling my eyes and transformed it into one of those books that I kept reading in one sitting.

Roxy Cumberland is barely keeping her head above water while trying to make it as an actress in New York. With bills piling up and opportunities proving elusive, she takes a job performing singing telegrams. Unfortunately for Roxy, her first assignment involves dressing up as a giant pink bunny and delivering a rather explicit song to a wealthy Manhattan lawyer on behalf of one of his former conquests.

And this book is really, really funny! Not “TikTok marketed as funny” where one character says something mildly sarcastic every forty pages and everybody loses their minds. I mean genuinely funny. The kind of humour that sneaks up on you in the middle of tension and makes you bark out an ugly little laugh before the book immediately throws another body at you.

Ali Hazelwood has built an entire literary empire out of highly intelligent women, emotionally constipated men, and workplaces vibrating with unresolved tension, and Two Can Play slides neatly into that lineage. This time, though, the setting shifts from laboratories and academia into the world of video game development, painted as a landscape of crunch culture, professional rivalry, creative obsession, and people surviving almost entirely on caffeine and bad sleep schedules.

On the surface, it’s a dark romance wrapped around obsession, anonymity, and a fantasy that edges close to something far more unsettling. But sit with it a little longer, and what unfolds is less about darkness for its own sake and more about what people reach for when they’ve been living too long without softness, without safety, without being truly seen.

Poppy and Alex don’t fall in love in the way most stories would have them do it. There’s no clean beginning. No single moment where everything changes. Instead, it’s a slow accumulation—shared trips, long conversations, habits that start to look a lot like dependence. By the time the question of “what are we?” comes into focus, the answer has been there for years. They’ve just avoided saying it out loud.

Daisy Maria walks through life with a gentle touch that’s both lovely and a bit fragile. She has this strong belief in love that leaves her open—always hoping, always reading into things, always wondering if she’s just a bit out of reach from the life she’s pictured for herself. When she says yes to fake-dating Levi, her ex-best friend and first crush, it’s not just a handy plot twist. It’s her way of returning to something unresolved, something that never got properly sort