This Rec League well and truly stumped us, which doesn’t happen often. Thank you to Rosemary for sending this one in:
What I am looking for are recommendations for books with sexy role play. When I look it up on Goodreads, it’s all Dom/Sub. What I’m looking for are couples pretending to be something they are not (cop, nurse, cheerleader, goth girl etc.). I’ve read modern novels where they play professor and student, historical novels where the Vicar and his wife pretend to be a farmer and a milkmaid. I even enjoyed a book where they play kidnapper and captive. As long as it’s pretended and consensual, I’m down.
We’ve got nothing, folks! Can you help us (and Rosemary) out?
Leave your suggestions in the comments below!
Try Big Boy by Ruthie Knox.
Should have thought of that! The “play” is so light, without any trappings of BDSM, that it’s good characterisation for the couple of where their vulnerabilities are.
There is a bit in Erin Nicholas’s Nice and Easy–a really fabulous friends to lovers, single parents in NOLA…
Another Ainsley Booth book,Retrosexual, from her Frisky Beavers series, has an older married couple (the PM’s overworked chief of staff and his wife ) meeting in Toronto and has a role play element. This one is a novella and can be read as a stand alone.
Returning very late to the party, but I knew this would happen. I thought of one more: INTO THE SHADOWS by Carolyn Crane (aka, Annika Martin). It’s one of Crane’s Undercover Associates books (how I wish she’d write more of them), but it can be read as a stand-alone. It’s a second-chance/secret-baby story between the daughter of a crime boss and one of the boss’s henchmen (who is actually working undercover…but the heroine doesn’t know that). Their role-play involves them pretending to be more amped-up versions of themselves: she pretends to be a spoiled mafia princess, full of snobbery and disdain, and he pretends to be even meaner & rougher than he actually is. INTO THE SHADOWS is romantic-suspense and does involve criminal gangs, so cw/tw for violence and criminal behavior (including human trafficking), but if you can look beyond that, the love story is surprisingly sweet and the role-play really hot.