Dear Maeve

Forbidden romance: who would you risk it for?

Forbidden romance puts a promise, a duty or a valued loyalty between adults who want each other. Sometimes there is a written rule. Sometimes the person she wants belongs to a part of her life she has always kept separate. The attraction is mutual; choosing it has consequences.

Choose The Long Con for desire across opposing assignments. What We Keep for Ourselves brings a woman of sixty-two close to her adult son’s friend. Where the River Narrows sets an invited kiss against a disagreement neither lover will abandon. All three are Steamy. For a quieter Warm romance, Private Viewing puts an investigator’s professional code between her and a gallery owner.

Warm intimacy fades to black; Steamy stories keep more sensual and emotional detail on the page without graphic description. Each selection explains its particular obstacle and links to the story’s content notes and chapter 1. Read every chapter free, with no account needed.

Choose your next story

The Quiet Consort

Completed · 15 chapters · Steamy
Every chapter free

Read this if you want a prince to listen to the woman everyone expects him to speak for.

Interpreter Talia Novak corrects a dangerous word in Crown Prince Edvard's treaty speech. He comes back to hear her out, and what begins with a disputed sentence becomes an attraction neither can keep separate from their public work.

The boundary is a professional contract and the weight of a public role, not a secret identity. Talia keeps her name on her work as she decides what she wants from Edvard. A Steamy contemporary romance with non-graphic intimacy; content notes include referenced parental illness and invasive press attention.

Read the story and content notes →

The Empty Place Beside Me

Completed · 18 chapters · Steamy
Every chapter free

Read this if you want the promise between them to be personal, and the friendship at stake to matter.

Adela promised her closest friend, Sennen, that Oswin would never sit at her table again. Three years after Sennen's death, Sennen's mother invites him to the annual supper. He notices where Adela has left herself to sit, and wanting his company begins to trouble the role she has kept for everyone else.

Where The Long Con puts opposing assignments between its leads, this coastal contemporary turns on grief and a promise made in anger. Steamy, with tender humour and sustained non-graphic intimacy; content notes include bereavement and remembered serious illness.

Read the story and content notes →

The Other Half of the Dance

Completed · 18 chapters · Steamy
Every chapter free

Read this if you want a new romance to test a friendship that still matters.

Coralia helped her closest friend keep Gethin’s rival dance night off their notices. Then he asks her to dance, and she discovers how much she wants his hand in hers. He has hurt people she loves; wanting him does not make their objections disappear.

The forbidden feeling comes from chosen loyalties in a close community. Both leads are in their forties, with jobs and friendships of their own. Steamy and non-graphic, with tender humour; content notes cover social exclusion, public criticism and relationship conflict.

Read the story and content notes →

The Long Con

Completed · 18 chapters · Steamy
Every chapter free

Read this if you want the person she wants to be the person paid to suspect her.

Two investigators take opposing assignments inside the same recovery firm. Ash is supposed to identify the person helping Delilah's clients, while Delilah begins to want evenings with him that neither can explain in a report.

The obstacle is divided loyalty: wanting each other does not give either of them permission to spend somebody else's confidence.

Read the story and content notes →

Under Two Signatures

Completed · 15 chapters · Warm
Every chapter free

Read this if you want a contract to be the wall.

An architect's firm forbids any contact with the anonymous investor funding her tower, and her partnership depends on it. Then she meets him without knowing who he is.

Tender rather than dangerous: the obstacle is paperwork and a career, and the secret is kept on both sides.

Read the story and content notes →

Private Viewing

Completed · 20 chapters · Warm
Every chapter free

Read this if you want the forbidding to be professional, and taken seriously.

An art-fraud investigator is assigned an eleven-million-euro forgery claim on a widower's gallery, and he is the first person in years to ask what she actually found.

The forbidding is her own professional code, and she takes it seriously. A quiet suspense about being believed.

Read the story and content notes →

The House That Keeps Her

Completed · 18 chapters · Warm
Every chapter free

Read this if you want the rule to be a professional oath.

A guild exorcist is bond-sworn to report the truth, and on the fourth night her instrument gives her a reading she cannot put in a report without deciding whose side she is on; she cannot be anything to the duchess while she holds the pen.

Gothic fantasy between two women, and the only book here where keeping the rule would destroy the person it is about.

Read the story and content notes →

After the War, Tea

Completed · 18 chapters · Warm
Every chapter free

Read this if you want the rule to be a treaty.

Article Twelve forbids former combatants any private dealing; breaking it means a cell for him and a lost licence for her, and a warden with no discretion once a complaint is filed.

Cosy fantasy with leads aged forty-nine and fifty-two: a tea-house counter, a village that remembers the war, and a treaty that makes even private kindness a risk.

Read the story and content notes →

The Man Assigned to Guard Her

Completed · 18 chapters · Warm
Every chapter free

Read this if you want the rule to be a trial.

A forensic accountant is three weeks from giving evidence against the men she found, and anything between her and the officer protecting her could hand the defence the argument that the police shaped her evidence.

The one book here where the rule protects a case rather than a marriage or a career; his power over her days is named on the page, and he never uses it to get closer.

Read the story and content notes →

The Vineyard at Lake Como

Completed · 16 chapters · Warm
Every chapter free

Read this if you want an obstacle nobody in the book is willing to say out loud.

He was her father's partner for eighteen years and has taught her the trade for two. The will lets him buy forty per cent of her estate before the thirty-first of December, and he has never once mentioned it.

No workplace rule and no case file: the distance here was set before the book opens, by someone who is not around to be argued with, and the village has watched the whole thing.

Read the story and content notes →

What We Keep for Ourselves

Completed · 18 chapters · Steamy
Every chapter free

Read this if you want a woman in her sixties to choose desire without treating her family as an enemy.

Tressa invites Elian to swim with her and leaves her adult son out of the invitation. Elian is her son's friend, a man she met only fourteen months ago. A walk and an openly wanted kiss give her something she does not want to reduce to being somebody's mother.

The leads are sixty-two and forty-nine, with homes and incomes of their own. The obstacle is a valued adult friendship and the privacy it once allowed, not a family relationship or permission from her son. Steamy, with non-graphic intimacy; content notes cover divorce and adult family conflict.

Read the story and content notes →

Where the River Narrows

Completed · 18 chapters · Steamy
Every chapter free

Read this if you want a kiss that leaves a real disagreement standing.

Veda skippers a fishing boat. Roscoe campaigns to close the estuary grounds she works. After seven weeks of arguments, she asks whether he came to disagree with her or kiss her. He wants the kiss. Neither offers to change sides.

The pressure comes from opposing convictions and a close coastal community, rather than a contract or a secret identity. Both leads are in their forties and have independent livelihoods. Steamy, with non-graphic sensuality; content notes cover threatened livelihood, community conflict and fishing.

Read the story and content notes →

The Garden After Dark

Completed · 18 chapters · Steamy
Every chapter free

Read this if you want a magical boundary and a heroine who has built something she fears changing.

Blythe can welcome Keir into her lit garden only while his moving light is safely capped. She finds herself wanting more of the man her still-light tradition has taught her to keep outside.

A Steamy fantasy between independent adult artists. The barrier includes a real conflict between their magical creations, alongside a tradition that has made affection feel forbidden.

Read the story and content notes →

Before the Last Bell

Completed · 20 chapters · Steamy
Every chapter free

Read this if you want the wait to be a promise he keeps without asking her to justify leaving it.

Lavinia wants Hugo, an unordained religious brother with six weeks left in temporary vows. They name the attraction and refuse a hidden romance. She will not be the reason he decides whether to leave a community he loves.

The boundary is a freely chosen commitment, not a corrupt rule or a forbidden family tie. A Steamy contemporary romance about desire, faith and the cost of asking plainly after the boundary ends.

Read the story and content notes →

Dear Maeve's own selection from the books we publish. Our novels are AI-assisted fiction published under editorial house names. Read our terms.