Quick reads you can finish in 10-30 minutes
Found 980 short novels in Sweet Romance
I never thought a forum thread and a secondhand quirk of fate would rearrange everything I believed about Emil. "Do you remember when he wet the bed?" my mother said one night in a tone like she was telling a tender secret, and I nearly choked on my tea. "No!" I said, too loud. "Mom, seriously." She laughed like a little bell. "I'm only saying, he was helpless. You two have always been close." "That doesn't make us—" I stopped myself. We had been neighbors for as long as I could...
I woke up because someone called me "Empress" and because a warm, heavy tail was pressed against my side. "Why would the Empress sleep like a stone?" a soft voice asked. "It is morning." Another voice said, bored. "You always sleep more than twenty times a day." I opened my eyes. The ceiling was a tent of faded cloth. Beside me, a young man—no human, really, his ears tipped like a fox's—was pretending to be a king. He had a long black tail, big and warm. He blinked at me like a...
"I always thought luck was a small, quiet thing—until the night it screamed." "Are you sure you're ready to tell us everything again?" Alana asked, folding a piece of paper like it would catch my memory. "Yes," I said. My arms trembled around themselves. "I remember most of it." "You were alone?" Mauricio leaned forward. "You said someone knocked and claimed to be a delivery." "He knocked like any courier," I said. "I opened, and he shoved the door. He had a baseball cap and a black...
I remember the day I was crowned in the capital as clear as the scar that learned to live on my left cheek. "I am Finley Coleman," I said when they first named me among the brides, and the crowd answered with the kind of clapping that makes your palms ache. "You will be a fine addition," someone whispered behind a fan. "They say the Prince is stern as winter." They meant Sebastian Otto. He knelt at the palace gate for an edict and left the city without looking back. The edict he...
Double Eleven, I went to meet him in real life. "I called your name in the dark," I whispered, holding the sheets like a child hiding from thunder. "Dion—no—Emmett?" "Who kisses you without learning names?" he said, and the room went cold. My heart stopped. "What do you mean? You're not Emmett?" I started to tremble. "Then who are you?" He pulled his arm back like he was brushing off a fly and said, "Not Emmett, anyway," with a voice that was all smirk and danger. I had come to...
I woke up inside someone else's life because I fell asleep in the library and the book I had been curled against had been even stranger than usual. "I thought I was napping," I told the thin slat of light at the window. "Apparently I napped into a plot." Mae Ford pushed the gauze aside and peered at me. "Miss, if you are done with dreams, breakfast is ready," she said. "I am done," I lied, sitting up too quickly. "Where am I?" "You are where you belong, Miss Jana," Mae said, with...
I remember the snow first. "It's like the night I stood outside and waited for you to look back at me," he says, and his voice is a ribbon of warmth. "We're not thirteen anymore," I answer, and he knocks my head lightly with the back of his hand. "Luca," I call him by the name I used when we were children. He is Emperor now; his proper title hangs in the air like a decree, but his palm on my shoulder is still the palm that steadied a crying girl who had slipped on cold stone. "You...
I woke to cold water and a raw sting behind my eyes. I fought the pull down, lungs burning, and spat until the taste of river mud filled the air. When my head cleared there was a pale rectangle floating just above the rocks, half translucent and blinking slow. "Loading..." it said in the middle, then a progress bar crawled. I touched the water from my skirt and the moonlight made the surface glassy. My name in that life felt thin as tissue—someone else's memory stitched poorly to mine....
I woke up gasping, heat and thirst crawling under my skin like hungry insects. My head felt heavy, my chest full of someone else's panic. I blinked into dim lamplight and found myself curled against a cold bolster, small and ridiculous in a house that smelled of iron and burned oil. “Who are you?” a voice cut through the dark. “Itzel,” I whispered. My name came out thin. I shoved myself farther into the corner. “Please—don’t—” The man across from me sat up. He was impossibly large. The...
The sea pulled at me with a polite cruelty, like a hand that knew my name and ignored it. "Ellis, help me!" I shouted, salt in my throat, the words cutting like cold glass. "El—" The water stole the rest of what I meant to say. My left ankle stung; something was wrapped around it under the surface, tugging me deeper every second. I knew how to swim. I swam before I could walk. But the ocean had ways of turning skills into stories you told other people later. My legs were not listening....
The night my phone doubled as a mirror and a scoreboard, I never planned to become anyone’s "quarrel queen." I had four thousand followers on a small platform and an appetite for blowing off steam. I had no idea a drunk upload and a shouted joke would change everything. "I can't believe you posted that," Janessa said, and I could hear her laugh like she was trying not to cry. "I didn't mean to," I said. "It was late. I was drunk. The clip was supposed to be private." "You have ten...
I spat a taste of iron and pushed my face up from the wet dirt. "Is she dead?" someone hissed, close by. "Dead," a high voice said, like a knife. "Good riddance." I felt the boot. Pain slammed my ribs. I did not want to move. I could not move. My whole skin felt like it had been ground and burned. "Leave her," the voice said. "If anyone asks, we never saw her." They left. Footsteps faded. Leaves brushed each other. The forest smelled old and wet and wrong. I blinked. Air was...
I learned that a familiar hand on my shoulder could feel like a stranger's. "Wyatt." I said his name like a warning. He smelled of beer and warm leather, the air around him bleeding the night's noise. He staggered past the doorway and landed on my couch like a man who had nowhere else to fall. "What is it?" he mumbled, eyes soft and clouded. He looked like the boy I'd carried home when we were twelve, but the voice was older, flattened by the bar. "We should divorce." I held the...
I never expected marriage to be a costume I could take off and on. I thought it would be ordinary, honest, a small rebellion against my past. I married fast — a lightning decision three months ago — because I wanted clean lines and no mess. I thought it would be simple. "Tell me again why we're married?" I asked once, in the dim light of our tiny kitchen. Axel Fernandes looked up from the plate he was wiping. His face held the kind of quiet that made people believe he owned nothing but...
I was twelve when the world changed outside our window and Miles started asking me questions he had never asked before. "Why are you sitting there like that?" he said, standing in my doorway, towel over his shoulders. I almost fell off the windowsill. He never spoke when he could avoid speaking. He was the sort who kept words for important things. So when he asked, "Are you thinking about not living anymore?" the towel on his head looked ridiculous and serious at once. I frowned and...
They shoved microphones at my face like hungry bees. I let them buzz. "Miss Laurent," a man with a camera said, "what do you say to people calling you spoiled, fake, unworthy of the industry?" "I say," I answered, and my voice was steady like a knife, "you don't get to rewrite my life with three clips and a rumor." "Oh come on, you know the videos—" a reporter barked. "You cut them," I said. "You chose what to air." I smiled. "Now, can we make space? People might get hurt if someone...
"Hey—it's me," I said into the phone, voice high and too cheerful for midnight. "Faye?" Estefania's sleepy voice replied. "Are you at 19CLUB again?" "I'm fine!" I sat up too fast in a stranger's booth and nearly dropped my drink. "I'm not drunk. I'm tired. I'm at a safe place. It's Garth's bar. I can go home myself." "Do you have your license?" she asked, and I heard a teasing smile. "Uh..." I squirmed. "Wait there. Be good. Don't drink too much." The line went dead. I flung the...
“Sit down,” I told myself out loud as the car door clicked shut and the driver eased into traffic. “I told you, your face is breaking the show,” Wade hissed from the front seat like he always did. He wears black and a scowl like it’s his job. “You sounded like you were preaching the Ten Commandments,” Gwen snorted. Gwen always laughs at my jokes like they’re the best things ever. “I’m listening!” I said, pretending to be studious while holding my tablet. The tablet was full of my...
I had never pictured a blind date could make me both glow and die inside at the same time. "Bennett," he said when he sat—simple, as if a name could settle a room. "Hello, Elisa." "Elisa," I answered, trying to sound like the writer who could flirt with paragraphs and men in equal measure. He reached for the teapot and poured for me with slow, precise movements. "You like books," he asked. "Yes," I said. "A lot." "You write?" His voice had the steady calm of somebody who taught...
I picked at the corner of the travel itinerary like it was a splinter and said, "I know. You can go." "Second Young Master," Bruno said, "this is today's schedule." "Thank you," I murmured, and slid the paper aside. I set the solved Rubik's cube on the table, the bright colors an insult to the gray day outside the porthole. Bruno bowed and left. The door clicked. I inhaled and, on impulse, folded the letter twice and tucked it into my pocket. "You sure you'll be all right?" he asked...
