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- The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
- Too many indie authors to list
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Romance with heat, heart, and heroines brave enough to reach for love.
Behind the byline
Carly Bryant writes contemporary romance full of heartfelt emotion, awkward charm, and love stories that linger after the last page. Her work includes sapphic, MM, and other emotionally driven romances, often following messy, tender characters as they stumble toward healing, self-acceptance, and the kind of love worth holding on to.
Carly lives in rural Kentucky with her husband and three dogs. When she isn’t writing, she’s usually reading, cheering on indie authors, or thinking about the next story that will break her heart a little before putting it back together.
⌖ Rural Kentucky
Visit the author’s website →The little things readers always want to know after the last page.
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Beyond Lantern
Finished books, full-length worlds, and other stories waiting wherever you buy books.
Published book
Photographer Sierra Turner has always been better at capturing other people's moments than living her own. Until one afternoon in the park changes everything.
Lauren creates beauty for a living, but they've spent years learning that being seen comes with risks. When their worlds collide, both must decide whether love is worth the vulnerability it demands.
Loving Lauren is a contemporary LGBTQIA+ romance about chosen family, personal growth, and discovering that sometimes the most beautiful love stories begin when you finally stop running from yourself.
Features pansexual and transgender protagonists with themes of family, identity, and healing. A tender, character-driven romance with gentle intimacy and emotional depth.
"Some things don't feel imagined. They feel like prologues, and Sierra wasn't ready to let go of the beginning."
Buy or learn more →Published book
Here's the thing about Jett Reyes-Villanueva: he's very good at leaving.
Not because he's cruel. Because he built exits into everything, back when he was a closeted kid getting shoved into lockers in Sunset Park and staying meant being a target. Twenty-four now, openly queer and the best event planner in Brooklyn, surrounded by the found family that's held him together since high school, he has a life designed to work exactly the way it does. Nobody stays. That's the system.
Then Ellis walks into his gym.

Found a new favorite?
He grew up on Long Island, moved to Brooklyn, and is carrying a secret he hasn't found the words for yet. He's quiet where Jett is loud, careful where Jett is reckless, and somehow exactly the wrong man for someone with no intention of falling in love.
Jett doesn't mean to fall. But what starts as coffee becomes something he has no system for. Something that gets past every defense he's spent years building. Something that, against all logic and personal history, makes him want to stay.
Loving Ellis turned out to be the easy part. It's letting Ellis love him back that breaks everything open.
A steamy, tender contemporary romance about the difference between freedom and running, and what it costs to finally choose someone out loud.
Book Two in the Chaos Coven series. Reads as a standalone.
Published book
Two lives. One city. Years of almost.
Sierra has her camera, her cat, and a friend group loud enough to qualify as a weather event. Lauren has a makeup brush, a borrowed room, and the kind of courage that only looks easy from the outside.
Both of them are building something. Neither of them knows what's missing until a golden hour in Prospect Park, a handful of birdseed, and the click of a shutter change everything.
The Inner Circle is the origin story behind the Chaos Coven series where two futures spent years running parallel before they finally, quietly, collided.
Buy or learn more →Published book
When a broken-hearted animal rescue owner meets a rising country star ten years her junior, sparks fly, but can their connection survive the real world?
Autumn Winters has sworn off men. At thirty-four, she's got enough on her plate running a struggling animal rescue without adding relationship drama. Then she locks eyes with Cole Stone across a crowded bar, and every rational thought vanishes.
He's twenty-four. A musician. Everything she's told herself to avoid.
But Cole sees past her walls, her insecurities, and her dog-hair-covered wardrobe. He wants her... age gap, trust issues, and all.
Three days. That's all they have before his tour takes him away. Three days to decide whether this combustible chemistry is worth the risk.
Because falling for Cole means believing she deserves a second chance at love. It means trusting that someone won't leave when things get hard. And it means figuring out if their different worlds can somehow collide without destroying each other.
Sometimes the best encores are the ones you never saw coming.
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