Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 980 short novels in Sweet Romance
I still remember the sharp, cold scent the summer air carried the first time I met him. It smelled like grapefruit—the kind my family teased me about when I was a baby—so people started calling me "Grapefruit." I am Annabelle Weiß, a freshman in the Advertising Department at Shenghua University, and this is the story of the winter I stood on a stage, got slammed by rumors, and then found myself pretending to be the girlfriend of the boy who had, without meaning to, become my whole small...
I woke up one morning and the whole campus treated me like a brand — hot, scandalous, and clickable. "You're number one," Jaime said without looking up from his phone. "Top three scandal queens, and you're the queen." "Very flattering," I said. "Who organized the poll?" I laughed, but my laugh landed flat. I had better things to waste my time on than trophies that smelled like gossip. "You're not even hiding how proud you are." Jaime tapped the screen again. "Someone wanted drama. You...
"I never thought I'd see him again," I said, and my voice came out smaller than I meant. "Why? You weren't exactly hiding," Jess Simmons said, nudging my elbow with a grin. "Come on, Norma. It's been seven years." "I know," I said. "But I checked the guest list twice. I checked that he wouldn't—" I stopped and pressed my fingers into the cloth of the table. The restaurant buzzed around us. The elevator had delivered a neat stream of classmates, each face a little older, a little...
I woke up with a hand on my throat and a wine breath that smelled like a wolf den. The first face I saw was too handsome to be sane: black hair crowned with feathers, a collar half-open, and eyes like knives. He tightened his grip and hissed my name like a verdict. "Mariah Pierce, you are dead meat." "Let go," I said, spiteful and half-asleep. "Who are you, and why are you choking me?" He sneered, blood at the edge of his lids, the air between us twitching with danger. "You dare touch...
I met him when I was twenty-seven. I didn't know then that he had come to that first meeting mostly to answer to his family. "We should at least meet," his mother had said over the phone three days before. "You two are close in age, and—" "I'll go," he told her. "If it helps, I'll go." So he came. We talked. Two weeks later we were engaged. Two months later we were married. "I promised myself," I said to a friend soon after, "that if I could not find love by twenty-seven, I'd marry...
I remember the way the birthing room smelled—of wet linen and smoke and a panic that moved like a living thing. "I can't—" Indie Foster said, her hands white-knuckled around the linen. "My lady, the child—" I was on the other side of the curtain, the housemaid who had pulled the curtain aside telling me every small movement as if it were a prophecy. "Indie, tell me plainly. Is he breathing?" "Yes. He's breathing, but—" Indie hesitated, then whispered, "He is very small. He is not...
I celebrate my birthday with a supermarket cake and a fake watch. Then I learn my boyfriend, the man I thought was a penniless startup dreamer, has been hiding a life of Ferraris and hospitals. He confesses. I refuse. He proves everything. Then he punishes the people who humiliated me in public — loudly, with witnesses. "Happy birthday," Jack said in the dark, his voice small and proud. He had stuck a candle into a little pre-packaged cake from the grocery store and turned off the lights....
I woke up and the world had rearranged itself around a stranger’s chest. "Who are you?" a low, controlled voice asked from beside the couch. "I'm... Alexandra," I answered, voice foreign and steady in a way mine rarely is in the morning. I blinked at my hands—broad, veined, callused in a way I’d never seen on myself. "And you are?" "Cairo Ford," he said. "Cairo..." I tried the name on my tongue. "Sounds familiar." "You don't remember me?" His brow creased. "I—" I laughed,...
I got drunk on my birthday. "I'll be fine," I told Lorenzo when he raised an eyebrow. "It's just one night." "You said that last time," Lorenzo said, hands already cupping a beer bottle. "And the time before that." "I'll be different tonight," I lied and smiled anyway. At midnight I waited, like I had every year, for that one private message. Years of habit make men ridiculous. When I was younger I thought my mother would show up somehow—call, text, something. She had been gone for...
I knew I was different the moment my ears woke me. "Name?" the man across the desk asked, tapping his pen like it was a gavel. I flopped my ears and tried to sound normal. "I don't have one. They call me... Rabbit." He blinked once, and I felt the way his gaze studied me, hungry for details like a cataloger. When he frowned, my ears drooped. When he relaxed, they lifted again on their own. I had woken up human. I had no memory of a childhood outside the forest. One night I slept in...
"Tell me your name." The fluorescent light hummed. Papers rustled. I watched the dark ink of Jin Ashford's pen move across the form, and for a second I forgot why I was there. "Elena Spencer." He didn't look up. He kept writing. He always kept his face like a curtain—almost neat, almost polite. Even in uniform he had a careful distance I never could cross without tripping over my own feet. "You can describe what happened." His voice was flat, official. It sounded like a door...
I remember the wind that night as if it were a living thing, clawing through cracked glass, shredding sound into screaming ribbons. "You can't die, Alicia," he kept yelling at me. "You promised—stay with me!" "I can't," I whispered, even as the world thinned, even as my skin felt like tissue and then nothing. "Rafael, live. Take my piece of this world and live." He didn't let go. The boy I had warmed for eight years clung to me like a drowning thing. I had spent a decade being an actor...
I never planned to make my life a drama, but a one-and-a-half-year-old and a phone had other plans. "Kailani, who's that?" Samir asked across the screen, voice calm as always. My niece—Kailani—had grabbed my phone and, with the kind of certainty only toddlers can own, announced into the camera: "Daddy!" I froze with a piece of stinky tofu halfway to my mouth. The phone tilted; Samir's face filled the screen, looking like he always did in photos and in memory—neat, controlled,...
I was supposed to graduate art school and walk into the city life my grandfather had already written for me. Instead, I stood in mud up to my ankles, holding a ruined sketchbook and a dead phone, while a steady pair of hands smiled at me like sunlight. "Are you all right?" he asked. "I—" I blinked at Esteban Estrada, at the way his round glasses slid down his nose, the way his shirt clung to his chest from the rain. "I think my ankle's twisted." "You sit," Esteban said. "I'll fix...
The breakup happened just now. I saw them through the slightly ajar door: Brady Zimmermann and Iliana Persson, lost in a kiss that was the same mouth that had kissed me ten minutes before. I stood at the threshold and watched until my phone rang. The sound cut through the hush and startled them. Brady looked up. His eyes were still soft, like he had been born to look that way; Iliana turned toward me with a smile that was almost a dare. "Kaylie," Iliana said lightly, like we were at a...
They left my bed like garbage on the balcony. "I thought you moved out for good," Keira said from my mattress, one leg tucked under her, as if the space belonged to her by right. "Really?" I said. "Did you take a lease on other people's things too?" Keira smiled the way a practiced actress smiles. Haylee and Kennedi flanked her like understudies who knew all the lines. "Emilia, don't be dramatic," Haylee said, rolling her eyes. "If you don't sleep here, why would we keep your...
I woke up to red petals and a body I did not recognize as mine. “You’re trembling,” he said, voice a husk of wine and winter. “Let me help you.” His palm was too large around my fingers. His breath smelled of something dark. “I—” I swallowed down a world I had rehearsed in another life. “I don’t belong here.” “Miles,” he corrected softly, smiling as if I were the fragile thing to be treasured. “My name is Miles Ramirez. You’re my wife now. Be quiet, Faith. Be my wife.” My name had...
I still see the ruined plain when I close my eyes: torn banners, broken chariots, the taste of iron on my tongue. I have held bones I could not name and watched men I loved fall like rotted trees. I held my sword as if it were a promise, then rode back to a land that wanted me in a different shape. “Are you sure you must take the helmet off?” Dylan asked, her hands steady on the straps of my rusted armor. “I will to sleep,” I said. “Call me what you used to, will you? Katie, not some...
I was running a meeting when Mason called me five times in a row. I slammed the office door open and felt every makeup layer fail me: cheeks flushed with embarrassment, forehead sweaty. I walked in like a walking storm. "Jane?" the homeroom teacher said, eyes wide. "This is—" I stopped listening. My gaze snagged on the corner of the classroom where Mason slouched, chin high, the kind of smug that makes your teeth itch, and then slid over to the person standing beside him. Fabian...
I never thought borrowing a tablet at midnight would change the course of my whole summer. "Elora, you can use mine," Malcolm said before my phone fell apart. "Leave it on the table when you're done." "Thank you," I whispered, clutching the slim device like it might fly away. I had to text someone—someone I had only known behind a screen. We had been chatting in that creative group all semester, and the idea of finally meeting made my stomach flip. I tapped "record" and spoke into his...
