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Romance

Endings worth the wait — love stories where the central question is how the couple gets there, not whether they do. Free sample opens chapter one.

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Romance on the shelf

The Apology Clause

Mara Rourke walks into Vance Associates expecting nothing but the reading of a will, and walks out the heir to a billion-dollar publishing empire she's been told her entire life is rotten to its core. Her grandmother Eleanor's last testament is merciless: Mara inherits nothing until she apologizes, in writing, to Julian Ashford, the novelist Eleanor publicly destroyed a decade ago. Mara believes every word Eleanor ever said about him was true. Apologizing would mean calling her grandmother a liar. Refusing would mean losing the company, the legacy, and the only chance to uncover why her family imploded. Julian Ashford didn't survive Eleanor Vance's empire by being naive. He agrees to meet Mara, on his terms. In exchange for an apology, he wants a seat on the foundation board, access to the archives, and a seat across from the woman who looks at him like he's the villain in a story she didn't bother to finish. What begins as a war of press leaks, legal threats, and a Page Six reporter with a long memory turns into something neither of them planned: a slow unraveling of the narrative they were both raised on. As Eleanor's private journals surface, Mara begins to see the woman behind the myth, and the man her grandmother may have wronged. The apology clause is no longer a condition of inheritance; it is a choice between loyalty to a lie and the chance to rewrite what was destroyed. To claim the future she wants, Mara will have to decide what the truth is worth.

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by Raven Holloway

Bound by the Raven's Shadow

When Elara Vance inherits Blackwood Manor from a relative she never knew existed, she expects dust, debts, and the bones of a forgotten estate. What she finds is far worse: Kieran Blackwood, the brooding last heir, waiting on the gravel drive with the wary eyes of a man who has not been seen in daylight for years. He warns her to leave. She refuses. The manor has secrets worth more than its decay, and Elara has spent her whole life being underestimated by men who think a woman cannot play their games. Kieran is bound by a pact older than the house itself, a debt his bloodline owes to a raven that is not a raven, an Entity that wears shadow like a cloak and speaks through the caw of every bird that lands on the chimney pots. Margaret Thorne, the housekeeper who never ages, serves something other than the family. Silas Vane, the solicitor with oil-smooth manners, wants the manor emptied for reasons he will not name. And Finn O'Connell, the groundskeeper with a burned hand and a guilty conscience, knows exactly where the bodies are buried. As Elara peels back the wallpaper of lies, she discovers a ritual that must be renewed with every generation, blood given, or blood taken. Kieran is meant to be the next offering. The only problem is that Elara is beginning to love him, and the Raven Entity has begun to notice her in return. To break the curse, she must descend into the catacombs beneath the west wing, confront the truth of what her own blood has to do with the manor, and choose whether she will sacrifice Kieran to save herself or burn the raven's shadow from the world at a cost the Entity is only too happy to name. Some inheritances are traps. Some curses are invitations. And in the heart of Blackwood Manor, the difference between a kiss and a kill is only a matter of timing.

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by O. Blackwood

Cursed Beneath a Thorned Moon

On the night of a blood moon, Octavia Blackwood steps out of a rain-lashed carriage and into Ravenshollow Manor, the estate her grandmother died protecting and the heir she swore she would never become. Lord Aldric Thornewood greets her with cold courtesy and haunted eyes, offering answers to questions she's carried since the night her coven burned: what killed her mother, and why does the greenhouse wraith whisper her name? Within Ravenshollow's crumbling walls, ghosts press close, Seraphina, the first wife who refuses to rest; a marsh wraith stalking the fenlands; and the shadow entity that hungers for Octavia's awakening bloodline. The Thornewood Coven still serves an old darkness, and Elder Maren believes Octavia is the key to either breaking the curse or completing it. Drawn to Aldric despite every warning, Octavia finds an unexpected ally in the reformed coven, and a future neither expected. To save the man she's beginning to love, the son she's only beginning to hope for, and the ghosts who deserve peace, she must claim her power before the next blood moon rises. The curse demands a sacrifice. Octavia intends to choose her own.

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Embers of the Marked Heart

Rain falls on Brackenmere as Poppy Ashworth climbs the rise back to the only home she has left, the village that once revered her mother's healing hands and now whispers of disgrace. The satchel at her hip holds little more than dried foxglove and yarrow, but the burden she carries is heavier: a family name turned to ash, a brother to protect, and a silence she swore to keep. When a bleeding stranger collapses at the village edge, bearing a strange, branded mark seared into his skin, Poppy cannot walk away. His name is Elias Thorne, and the mark he carries belongs to a world she was told had been buried forever. Dr. Lena Voss arrives with questions wrapped in clinical calm. Margot Finch watches from her shop window, smiling too knowingly. Cyrus Vane, a man whose power runs beneath the village like old roots, begins to circle. And Rogue Hollow, crumbling, secretive, hers, holds its breath as Poppy chooses whether to hand Elias over, hide him, or follow the ember of truth burning at the center of his secret. Because some marks do not simply appear. They are placed. And whoever placed his is coming to collect.

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Kissing the Wrong Reyes

Gemma Reyes built her career on other people's stories. Now, with her magazine on the verge of folding and her byline about to disappear, her editor hands her one last assignment: a holiday human-interest feature she can file from anywhere. Gemma files it from the one place she swore she'd never write about , her family, in the Dominican community she fled years ago. Home for the first time in years, she lands directly in the orbit of Devon Castell, her cousin Marco's oldest friend, the man her grandmother Doña Altagracia has spent a decade warning her away from, and the one person she cannot stop thinking about. Devon is tangled in her family's history in ways Gemma is only beginning to understand, tied to her brother Marco Aurelio through loyalty, debt, and a secret that could shatter everyone involved. As Gemma digs deeper into the story she was sent to write, she uncovers a web of old betrayals stretching from New York back to the island , betrayals involving her father, her cousin's wife Renata, her sharp-eyed aunt Lucia, and the steady, watchful Marisol Vega. Every page she files brings her closer to a truth the family has buried for years. Every moment with Devon pulls her further from the role of dutiful daughter, loyal cousin, and impartial journalist. When the story finally comes into focus, Gemma must choose between the byline that could save her career and the people whose trust she will lose the moment it's published. The Reyes family has survived exile, heartbreak, and a decade of unspoken truths. The only question is whether Gemma's homecoming will be the thing that finally breaks them , or the thing that brings them back together.

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by C. Nightshade

Nightshade and Ember

Cora Nightshade is a curse-breaker with a reputation for taking the jobs that kill lesser thieves, and a price on her head that makes the penthouse elevator feel like a one-way trip. The locket is wrapped in enough dark magic to make a priest go deaf and a witch go mad, and Lord Malachi wants it back badly enough to send his enforcers hunting. She takes the job anyway, because no one else will, and because the payday means finally disappearing from everyone who wants her dead. The complication has a name: Kieran Ashford, a centuries-old vampire whose hidden journal is the key to the curse, but also to a bloodline mystery someone is willing to kill to keep buried. As Cora's heist spirals into a web of vampire informants, gorgon enforcers, and a banshee who knows her by reputation, she finds herself allied with the one creature more dangerous than the Council's hunters. Together they must outmaneuver Malachi, survive the curse, and decide whether the truth buried in Kieran's past is worth the cost of claiming it. In a world where every monster has a motive, trust is the most dangerous thing she can steal.

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Pulse of the Voss

Zara Voss wakes to a proximity alarm and a neural implant that should not exist , a stolen piece of hardware pulsing behind her left eye, broadcasting signals she cannot shut off. Hunted aboard the Mourning Star by Dorian Vael, a magnetic operative with a vendetta and a shared past she will not name, Zara has only one place left to run: toward her estranged brother Malachai, the one person she betrayed to stay alive. Between them stand Juno Tarek, a medic with divided loyalties; Dr. Sael Kren, the surgeon who wired her for survival; Lyra Voss, the sister Zara cannot protect; and Ryn Sael, a ghost frequency whispering through her implant in a voice that feels like home. Every corridor of the Mourning Star hums with static, surveillance, and the ache of things left unsaid. To survive, Zara must decode the transmissions flooding her mind before the Vael brothers close in. To save her family, she must sever the implant that makes her valuable , and lose the only edge she has. To claim a future, she has to choose who she lets in, who she lets go, and whether the pulse in her blood is a gift, a curse, or the last heartbeat of the life she used to live. Pulse of the Voss is a seductive sci-fi romance about stolen signals, second chances, and the dangerous frequency between love and survival.

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Terms of Engagement

Penelope Sterling has spent years carefully constructing a quiet life away from the Sterling estate's weight of old money and older grudges, so when a heavy ivory envelope arrives on an ordinary Tuesday, sealed in copperplate script and summoning her back to settle her grandmother's estate, she nearly tosses it with the junk mail. The will contains a clause she never anticipated: her inheritance is bound to terms she didn't write, contingent on the cooperation of parties the family has reason to distrust. Eleanor, her sister, is already entangled in the proceedings, caught between loyalty to Penelope and pressure from Margaret O'Brien, the steely aunt who treats inheritance like a chess match. Complicating everything is Julian Ashford, whose family's ties to the Sterlings run deep and contentious, and whose presence turns every legal discussion into something far more personal. As Penelope picks through the fine print alongside Mrs. Chen's herbal broth and unsolicited counsel, she must weigh whether the life she's built is worth more than the legacy she's being offered. Victor Slade's opportunism, Henry Drummond's quiet influence, and the unexpected alliance of Dr. Yara Okafor all press her toward a decision that will reshape not just the family fortune, but the woman she chooses to become. Some clauses can be negotiated. Others demand everything.

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by Sophia Ashford

The Art of Falling

The call came at fourteen minutes past three on a Tuesday afternoon, and Eleanor Ashford almost let it go to voicemail. A ballet instructor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Eleanor has built a quiet life on her own terms, until the voice on the other end of the line informs her she has inherited a fortune from a family she barely knew existed. The catch? The will comes with conditions, a web of secrets, and a circle of powerful men who all seem to want something from her. Mr. Pemberton, the estate's calculating executor, offers guidance that feels far too controlled. Marcus Blackwood, magnetic and dangerous, sees Eleanor as the key to a rivalry decades in the making. And Sebastian Croft, the charming solicitor's son, may be the only person willing to tell her the truth. As the clauses of the inheritance begin to close around her, Eleanor is forced to confront a past she never knew, and a future she never chose. Surrounded by secrets, suitors, and lies dressed as kindness, she must learn the art of falling without losing herself entirely. The only question that remains is whether, when the dust settles, she'll be the one holding the strings, or the one left holding nothing at all.

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The Cartographer of Lost Things

Ariadne Vale wakes to two sharp pulses of alarm aboard the Halcyon and the salt-sour smell of a copper pipe threatening to burst behind her bunk. She is a cartographer of lost things , heirlooms, ledgers, letters , but the wreckage of the Eurydice, waiting in the deep, is a recovery she never agreed to take. Drawn into the salvage by her brother Idris Vale, she finds herself working beside Sasha Okonkwo's steady hands, Lucien Draves's unsettling charm, Jules Tanaka's careful silences, and Venn Mercer's buried agenda. Each of them carries a private debt to the wreck. As the dive uncovers objects that should have been lost forever, Ariadne begins to suspect the Eurydice did not sink by accident , and that someone on her own crew intends the dive to fail. Torn between the salvage she is sworn to protect and the people she is only beginning to trust, Ariadne must chart a course through water that does not forgive mistakes. The deeper she goes, the clearer the truth becomes: the lost thing she has been searching for is not on the seabed. It is the version of herself she abandoned long before the Eurydice went down. What she brings back to the surface will determine which of them survive , and whether love, once found, is something she dares to keep.

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by Violet Mercer

The Color of Letting Go

Margaret Calloway's headlights carve a pale corridor through the fog as she descends into Bellwood Cove, the salt-bitten coastal town she swore she'd never return to. She has come for her late aunt's will and nothing more, certain that distance and years have erased whatever痕迹 she once left behind. She is wrong. Waiting on the porch of the old Harborside Lane house is Eliot Nash, the boy she loved at seventeen, now a widowed father with a stubborn daughter, a quiet son, and a grief that mirrors her own in ways she is not ready to name. Margaret's sister Lily watches from a distance, wary of wounds reopening; the town's harbor pilot, Sam Hartley, offers the kind of uncomplicated friendship Margaret doesn't know how to accept; and Daniel Reeves, executor of the estate, seems to know more about the property's secrets than the paperwork suggests. As Margaret restores the crumbling house room by room, she begins to uncover letters her aunt hid, truths about her mother she was never told, and the slow realization that Eliot has carried her absence for as long as she has carried his. Each repaired shutter and recovered memory pulls her deeper into a town that refuses to release its own. Margaret can leave again, can climb back into her car and disappear into the life she built without roots, or she can stay, let the walls fall, and risk the only family she has left: the one she walked away from before she ever truly learned to hold it.

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The Hollow Between Us

Twenty years after surrendering her newborn son to a closed adoption, Tessa Whitmore returns to the dying farmhouse in Cypress Hollow to bury her grandmother Eleanor and settle an estate she hasn't seen since she ran. The October wind carries more than dead leaves: it carries the scent of old woodsmoke, the creak of a porch that remembers her, and the weight of a letter Eleanor wrote but never sent. When Tessa learns that Nate Calloway , her son , has grown into a reserved young man working the neighboring land and helping raise a child of his own, the secret she's carried becomes a wound that refuses to stay closed. As Eleanor's journals surface, a hidden history emerges: a grandmother who tracked the boy across twenty years, who loved him in secret, who built a bridge between mother and son neither of them knew was missing. Tessa watches Nate with a grandson who doesn't know she's his mother, and the pull between them deepens into something neither can name. Maren Hollis, the sharp-eyed friend who remembers the old Tessa, watches the secret corrode her. The Portland lawyer holds documents that could end the silence. And at the center of it all stands little Eli, the child caught between two families who both want to claim him. Every truth Tessa uncovers risks the fragile peace Nate has built. Every day she stays pulls her deeper into the son she surrendered and the life he never knew she wanted. To honor Eleanor's love, Tessa must decide whether to keep the secret that protects her , or finally let her son see the mother who never stopped searching.

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The Shape of June

June Hartley thought she had escaped Pine Hollow, Vermont, for good, until a call about her estranged mother's failing health pulls her back to the sleepy town that never quite forgave her for leaving. The diner still serves the same bitter coffee, her old rival Dottie Marsh still trades barbs across the counter, and the locals still remember every mistake she made at eighteen. The only warmth comes from Peggy, the spunky diner owner who took her in as a teenager, a one-eared stray cat named Mr. Whiskers, and Henry Fitzwilliam, the stoic, soft-spoken farmer next door who says little but notices everything. As June begins restoring the crumbling family farmhouse she swore she'd never return to, she unearths a decades-old secret her mother buried with the foundation. Meanwhile, the formidable Large Marge, a woman whose opinion can make or break a newcomer's standing, is keeping a close eye on June's every move, and on Henry's unexpected interest in the Hartley girl who once broke his heart. The harder June tries to keep her distance, the more Pine Hollow pulls her in. With her old life in the city demanding she come back and a new life quietly taking root in the soil of her childhood, June must decide whether home is the place she fled, or the only place she was ever meant to stay.

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Walls of Park Avenue

Behind every locked Park Avenue door lies a dynasty built on silence , and one woman determined to uncover what the Ashfords have spent generations hiding. When Seraphina Vale steps off the private elevator, she enters the rarified world of the Ashfords: old money, old grudges, and a dark walnut door that never opens for outsiders. Drawn into the orbit of the guarded Grant Ashford, his sharp-tongued mother Vivienne, his fierce grandmother Margaret, and his wounded sister Iris, Seraphina soon discovers that love inside these walls comes with conditions written in contracts no one signs out loud. Between couples therapy sessions that lay the family bare, gallery politics that pit ambition against legacy, and a small dog named Muffin who seems to know exactly where the bodies are buried, Seraphina is forced to choose: retreat to the safe life she left behind, or fight for a family that may never fully accept her. As old betrayals resurface and a Gallery Director's quiet machinations threaten to expose them all, Seraphina learns that the walls of Park Avenue were built to protect something , and someone , who cannot survive the truth. To love an Ashford means to unlock the door from the inside. The question is whether what's behind it will set her free, or bury her with the rest of their secrets.

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Where the Thorn Meets the Wren

Eleanor Vance inherits Thornfield Hall from a man she barely remembers, and the will reads like a confession. With her sister Margaret's worried letters folded in her reticule, she makes the journey alone, past hedgerows and low October skies, until the grey stone of her new inheritance rises against the fields. The solicitor, Mr. Pembury, is formal; the housekeeper, Mrs. Quill, is watchful; and the master of the house, Mr. Aldric Thorne, greets her with a restraint that borders on hostility, as though her very arrival has unsettled something long buried. He insists he is the rightful heir. The law, and the strange solicitor Mr. Hartwell, appear to disagree. As the days shorten and the house draws tighter around its occupants, Margaret's letters arrive with warnings Eleanor cannot dismiss. Then comes the stranger at the gate, claiming the name and identity of a man everyone believes long dead, a man whose name is written into Eleanor's inheritance. The housekeeper's nephew, Tom Quill, sees what others miss; the autumn gales strip the last leaves from the wren-bowered hedgerows; and the truth begins to surface like a stone turned from dark earth. Eleanor must decide who to trust before the past closes its hand around her, because in a house where every name is contested, the wrong choice may cost her not only Thornfield, but the man her quiet heart has begun, against all reason, to lean toward.

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