Your Ultimate May 2026 Romance Reading List

Renley Gossage is determined to restore Cape Meril’s beloved candy shop and prove she’s nothing like her disgraced father — no shortcuts, no distractions, and absolutely no wealthy men complicating things. Then Theo Williams appears next door, a posh, overconfident Brit fleeing a viral fake engagement and his controlling father. She’s paint-splattered and stubborn. He’s persistent and surprisingly willing to learn how to use a sander.

Between crumbling drywall, meddling neighbors, and her scheming aunt, their reluctant proximity slowly builds into something neither of them planned for.

Dolly Brick has navigated every hardship alone — her mother’s abandonment, single parenthood, and now returning to Whitfield, Rhode Island, to save her family’s home. When she stumbles upon Stewart Whitfield mid-humiliation beside a flat tire, her instinct to help leads her into a fake relationship arrangement with the annoyingly handsome local scion. Public dinners and charity benefits were manageable. Sunset boat rides and kisses that feel dangerously real are something else entirely.

Dolly has never leaned on anyone — but Stewart is making self-sufficiency increasingly hard to justify.

Professional bull rider Emmett Bush joins reality dating show Romance Ranch purely to save his family’s farm — love is nowhere in his plans. Then Julia Silva arrives as the location consultant: sharp, beautiful, and completely off-limits as his rival’s little sister. She’s been warned about him. He knows better.

Yet despite their best efforts, mutual wariness melts into stolen kisses and secret rendezvous. With his family’s legacy riding on him finishing the show, Emmett faces an impossible problem — he’s fallen for someone who was never a contestant.

Daisy’s luck in love is as withered as her shop’s reputation — ever since Mayor Kelly declared the Daisy Chain Flower Shop cursed in one of his infamous visions, customers have been scarce. Elliot is a recent Dream Harbor transplant nursing his own heartbreak, and he’s been carefully avoiding the cursed shop. But when he finally steps through the door, something unexpected blooms.

Could this chance encounter prove the mayor wrong — and show them both that love has a way of arriving exactly when you’ve stopped searching for it?

Duffy Distefano’s passionate love for Minneapolis Coyote football backfires spectacularly when a disastrous mascot encounter turns her into the internet’s favorite villain. Her damage-control TV interview takes an unexpected turn when star tight end Connor Cunningham joins her on air — and their instant, bickering chemistry goes viral.

The team’s PR squad pushes Connor to ask Duffy out, but what starts as a publicity stunt quickly feels dangerously real. With secrets ready to explode and everything on the line, Connor realizes losing Duffy would be the greatest fumble of his career.

Ten years ago, a devastating fire shattered four friendships and sent Mila Ferguson fleeing Hart’s Landing. Returning reluctantly to handle a crisis, she’s desperate to avoid her critical mother — and Everett McKean, the boy she once kissed. But Everett, now the town’s beloved mayor, has never stopped thinking about her and sees her return as a long-awaited second chance.

As Mila rebuilds old bonds and opens her heart, unsettling questions resurface about who truly started the fire — and whether the truth will set her free or destroy everything she’s rebuilding.

Nomadic travel influencer Hannah Spencer inherits a crumbling Cape Split beach house — only to discover she owns just half of it. The other half belongs to stranger Simon O’Malley. Spending the summer making repairs together, they uncover the cottage’s romantic history while their own relationship transforms from rivalry into something tender and unexpected.

But Simon plans to sell when summer ends. For Hannah, who’s spent years searching for belonging, Cape Split feels like home — and Simon feels like the reason. She just needs to convince him to feel the same.

Ambitious and budget-conscious Clover Walsh discovers a loophole when her housing grant falls through: married couples share dorm costs. Desperate, she proposes to the last person she’d ever choose — Bennett Graves, coffee empire heir and the boy who once broke her heart. Bennett, guilt-ridden over their past, can’t refuse. The problem? They can barely stand each other, let alone share a room.

But as they navigate their secret arrangement — and its unexpected perks — the line between performance and reality begins to blur, and their fake marriage starts feeling dangerously, inconveniently real.

Lady Genevieve Hughes arrives at a haunted Scottish Highland abbey with her pet piglet and elderly husband, hoping to encounter a ghost. Instead, she finds charming new friends — and Sir Godric Everly, a sardonic solicitor with a deep dislike for Lord Burnsby.

When mysterious wills and a shocking marriage certificate unravel Burnsby’s past, he promptly dies, leaving Evie a virgin widow navigating a tangle of false identities, broken vows, and dangerous secrets. Amid the chaos, Sir Godric becomes her unlikely anchor — and perhaps something far more.

Convinced her love life needs fixing, JoJo Burton plans to pursue her first crush at her sister’s cruise ship wedding — hoping closure will cure her intimacy issues. She recruits childhood best friend Cooper Watts as wingman, despite the fact that he disappeared to London four years ago without explanation and was, if she’s honest, her greatest heartbreak.

As their fake flirting, shared cabin, slow dances, and jealous glances pile up, JoJo realizes her long-sought closure may not lie with her first crush — but with the man already beside her.

Driven orthopedic surgery resident Isabelle Mercado has one problem threatening her otherwise perfect life: her ex will be at a glamorous Paris wedding — with his new fiancée. Her solution is soccer superstar Austin Cade, who needs image rehabilitation and elite connections she can provide. A mutually beneficial fake relationship, nothing more.

But somewhere between champagne toasts, macaron classes, and starlit Parisian evenings, their arrangement stops feeling like performance. Isa has always chosen career over love — but Paris, and Austin, are making that resolution increasingly difficult to keep.

Frankie and George have been best friends since childhood — passionate, clashing, and always finding their way back to each other. But when Frankie’s fiancé abandons her the morning after their wedding eve celebration, leaving only a note, George proposes an unconventional remedy: take the honeymoon anyway, together, among Tofino’s rainforests and misty beaches.

Frankie sees it as a chance to salvage their strained friendship. But a week alone together begins unearthing buried secrets and long-suppressed feelings — threatening to either heal everything between them, or shatter it for good.

Four years after graduation, Camille Luna’s life is unraveling — suffocating career, crushing debt, and a messy breakup fracturing her friend group. When one bad night lands her in jail, it’s Danny Brennan, the group’s lovable former slacker, who bails her out and whisks her to his thriving Rhode Island seaside restaurant for the summer.

Between ocean dips, restaurant shifts, and rediscovered writing, Cam realizes Danny makes everything feel alive again. But as September looms, she must choose between her comfortable old life and the terrifying, friendship-complicating possibility of falling for him.

Romance-novel devotee Luna Starr handles grief the only way a dreamer knows how — by purchasing a tiny farm in Celestial, Texas, determined to live out her cowboy fantasies. Local high school coach and reluctant handyman Tate Jacobs wants nothing to do with cowboys despite his ranching family’s legacy, but Luna’s gloriously hazardous DIY renovation attempts make ignoring her impossible.

As he helps her fix the farmhouse, unexpected chemistry proves harder to repair around. Luna came to Celestial chasing fictional romance — but the real thing turns out to be far better.

Everly can orchestrate love stories for everyone except herself. Back from Dublin and helping launch her aunt’s animal rescue center, her peaceful summer is disrupted by the arrival of Conri “Wolf” Reilly — her roommate’s brooding, tattooed Irish twin brother whose rugby career needs serious image rehabilitation. She reluctantly houses him in exchange for volunteer work. Now they’re neighbors, colleagues, and locked in a battle of irritation and undeniable tension.

Wolf came to America to fix his reputation, not fall for his sister’s best friend — but Fletcher Mountain apparently has other plans.