Spicy romance books
Looking for romance with on-page heat? Start with the books rated 3 to 5 on our spice scale. These original stories live on Spicy Reads, with a book-level heat rating to help you choose and chapter-by-chapter Spice Maps where available.
Spicy romance, steamy romance, erotic romance, and smut are terms readers use in different ways. A number and a premise tell you more: compare the heat rating, tropes, and story description before picking your next read.
How to choose your next read
Choose a trope you enjoy, then compare heat and reading time. A short story suits one sitting; a longer novel gives the relationship more room to develop.
Our spice-rating guide explains what the numbers tell you. Reading is through the app after early access is granted.
40 original stories to explore
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Sauna Rules
Heat 5/5Britt Hallqvist has wanted Wes Sadowski for four years, since her brother introduced his captain with a warning: not my sister. Wes said he wouldn't dream of it.
Brothers best friend · Forbidden · Hockey
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The Twelfth Crossing
Heat 4/5Funeral cosmetician Basia Sikora has spent eleven Halloweens crossing to a vampire court under Manhattan for one night with the man she buried in an empty casket.
Second chance · Forbidden · Slow burn
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The Herald's Welcome
Heat 5/5A mask-maker. A mortgage. One midnight, two answers. On Halloween night the Five Houses come to Penwarne Hall for the Masque. At midnight every guest gives a name to the Herald, and she answers Welcome or Turned out.
Revenge romance · Morally gray · Enemies to lovers
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Blood on Call
Heat 4/5Dr. Imani Brooks owes $211,000, so when a man with the coldest hands she's ever shaken offers $1.2 million for a year of night shifts, she signs. Then her bodyguard, Ansgar Holm, mentions that no human physician has lasted a year.
Bodyguard · Forbidden · Touch her and die
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The Four-Eleven
Heat 4/5If you grew up between Erie and Pittsburgh, you've heard her: four minutes and eleven seconds of a seven-year-old whispering to a 911 dispatcher from her mother's closet, the call that put her father in prison for life.
Slow burn · Touch her and die · Protective hero
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Crimson Sacrament
Heat 5/5Three days after her father dies in a car bomb in Naples, London lawyer Valentina Marchetti agrees to marry the heir of the Roman family she suspects of his murder, on her own terms, with a way out written into the contract.
Enemies to lovers · Arranged marriage · Mafia romance
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What the Glass Keeps
Heat 4/5Linnea Hart blows wedding goblets in a snowbound mortal town and hides what her glass does that no glass should: it holds light after the flame is gone. Then a letter arrives under pale blue wax.
Slow burn · Touch her and die · Protective hero
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The Taste of Staying
Heat 4/5Sadie Monroe quit a Chicago kitchen in front of a full dining room. Now she has a camp cook's job on a Montana ranch and a letter to prove it. She arrives on branding morning to one man, sixty eggs and a cold griddle.
Grumpy sunshine · Single parent · Found family
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Last Call at Fairley's
Heat 4/5Meredith Fairley has seven days to sell her late father's harbor bar and every intention of being back in Boston before anyone asks the one question she can't survive answering. The plan doesn't survive the front door.
Second chance · Small town · Forced proximity
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The Light He Leaves
Heat 5/5Tuesday you wore the green sweater with the loose cuff. Your window takes about four seconds to open from the outside. Blair Keating hosts a true-crime podcast about four women, six years, and the porch light left burning after each.
Stalker · Morally gray · Touch her and die
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The Heir She Came to Kill
Heat 5/5The night her father is shot inside his own club, pastry chef Livia Arzani wraps his .38 in a dish towel and walks into the enemy's nightclub to kill its heir. Damiano Ruvolo takes the gun from her in three seconds.
Enemies to lovers · Forbidden · Touch her and die
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Wife of Record
Heat 5/5Ivy Sorel typed the trial that put Basile Arceneaux in Angola. Months later his family wants her dead, and the man they paid to do it is sitting at her kitchen table, drinking her tea. Anton Duquesne does not deny the contract.
Marriage of convenience · Forced proximity · Morally gray
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Postmarked
Heat 4/5The letter arrived in her own handwriting. It described the night she spent in the Postmaster's bed, and the afternoon, seven days from now, that she died.
Immortal hero · Fated lovers · Forced proximity
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The Truce Line
Heat 4/5The first time her family hands Neve Tolliver the shot, the wolf in her crosshairs looks straight up her scope. Heat hits her low, and her finger will not pull. Then he does the last thing a hunted wolf should.
Fated mates · Enemies to lovers · Forbidden
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The Clause
Heat 4/5Frankie Reyes runs the machine that decides who gets to stay at Carrick University, and this year the machine needs a love story. Her love story.
Fake dating · Grumpy sunshine · Forced proximity
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Clean Hit
Heat 4/5When the Carrick Forge's enforcer is benched after a rage blackout puts an opponent in the hospital, Dr. Maya Sinclair is assigned to decide whether he is safe to return.
Forbidden · Forced proximity · Slow burn
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Stolen Shifts
Heat 4/5Claire Donovan moved nine hundred miles for a job that was hers, in a city where nobody remembered the wedding that never happened.
Brothers best friend · Secret relationship · Forbidden
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The Donor
Heat 5/5Forty-two thousand pledged against a two-hundred-thousand goal, and the board is ready to cut Hana Nakamura's emerging artists program. Julian Crewe isn't on the guest list.
Strangers to lovers · Billionaire
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Read Option
Heat 4/5An injured NFL quarterback hiding out on Cape Cod meets a fiercely private MFA student who has no idea who he is.
Forced proximity · Secret relationship · Secret identity
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Say It Twice
Heat 5/5For seven years Kilbride has guarded Orla Callaghan, called her Miss Callaghan and never touched her. She has tried everything. She is the boss's daughter, and he is her father's man.
Bodyguard · Forbidden · Age gap
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The Fitting Room
Heat 5/5Six years of bespoke tailoring have taught Nadia to take a man's measurements without a flicker on her face.
Strangers to lovers
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The Cost of Clay
Heat 4/5She needs everything in writing. He has spent six years keeping the real numbers off the page.
Slow burn · Workplace romance · Opposites attract
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A League of Salt
Heat 4/5A smuggler captain. The Crown officer she blames for her brother's death. One sea-witch's bargain gone wrong.
Enemies to lovers · Forced proximity · One bed
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Not a Hand to Steady Her
Heat 4/5Nell Kersey finds a book that was never on the inventory: black leather, no title, her mother's name inked into a page three hundred years old.
Forbidden · Slow burn · Morally gray
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Countersigned
Heat 5/5For three years Margot Dunne has been Gavin Stroud's executive assistant, and she has said every instruction back to him.
Boss employee · Workplace · Age gap
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Play Until Dawn
Heat 5/5Every Wednesday since March, harpist Carys Pryce has ended her pub set with the same slow air, for the man in the corner who never drinks his pint.
Fae · Holiday · Age gap
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The Upper Pool
Heat 5/5The card by the kettle says never go to the upper pool on a full moon. I mean it. Six weeks alone as winter caretaker of a shut hot-springs lodge, Addie Laurent puts on lipstick and goes.
Fated mates · Shifter
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Practice Makes
Heat 5/5Truth or dare on Kira's floor, two glasses of good tequila each, and Daniel asks whether Kira and Maya have ever kissed. Once, at nineteen, for practice, and in eleven years the best friends have never spoken of it.
Friends to lovers · Ffm
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Grotesque
Heat 5/5Nine days into a Detroit heat wave, stone restorer Esme Novak works nights on a swing stage thirty-one floors up, cleaning a century of soot off the Ambrose Building's grotesques.
Monster · Age gap
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Night Ink
Heat 5/5Seventeen Thursdays running, at two in the morning, Pilar Solano has tattooed the same five words of old script over the same man's heart in her Baltimore shop. Ulrich pays too much, in cash.
Vampire · Age gap
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The Tell
Heat 5/5Laurel Pruitt's little brother Tommy owes a motorcycle club eleven thousand dollars. On a Friday night in a Nevada heat wave, she walks into the Kingsnakes' clubhouse with her savings in an envelope, and the president won't take it.
Morally gray · Motorcycle club
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House Lights
Heat 5/5Four thousand people have run from Josie. She plays the corpse in an Ohio haunted maze, and only one man never runs. For eleven nights Vaughn Burkett has stopped at her table, and every word proves he's been watching.
Stalker · Touch her and die · Morally gray
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Signal Fire
Heat 5/5The Marble Creek fire has closed Route 9, dispatch says shelter in place, and Jordyn hears boots on the stairs of Tower Fourteen. It's Maren Cole from Tower Eleven, the woman she has barely spoken to off the radio in three years.
Forced proximity · Friends to lovers · Second chance
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Four Stars
Heat 5/5One star. Three nights ago, critic Eloise Chen called Luca Varro's smoked duck technically flawless and emotionally vacant, and the internet lost its mind.
Enemies to lovers
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Developing Chemistry
Heat 5/5One sequencer, one six a.m. slot, and Sam Okafor has written his name on top of Noor Karim's in heavier pen. At 2 AM in Lab 412 they share an advisor, three years of arguments and one shot at the Whitfield's two years of funding.
Rivals to lovers · Academic · Workplace
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Called in the Sixth
Heat 5/5The game is called in the sixth, the power dies, and the stadium's service elevator stops between the press level and the clubhouse.
Forced proximity · Forbidden · Baseball
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The Safe Word
Heat 5/5Six years married, and Gemma and Ethan have planned this night on the back of the gas bill: his navy silk tie, her hands above her head, one edge and only one, and a safe word picked over breakfast. Pineapple.
Established relationship
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Last Lift
Heat 5/5Two towers short of the summit, the last gondola of the day jerks to a stop, and Ava Doran is left hanging sixty feet above the trees with a stranger. Oren Keller guides ice climbers for a living, and a dead cable doesn't rattle him.
Strangers to lovers · Forced proximity
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Red Eye
Heat 5/5The upgrade is a fluke. Three weeks ago Sophie walked out of eight careful years at a law firm, and now she is in first class on the red eye from JFK to LAX, holding her magazine upside down, and the man in 2B has noticed.
Strangers to lovers · One night
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The Understudy
Heat 5/5Camille can't stop counting through the stage kiss, and ten times now the director has noticed. So after the show, alone under the ghost light, she runs the love scene again, and her understudy walks down the aisle.
Workplace · Ff
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