Books where fake dating leads to true love

A renowned former baseball player (both on and off the field) wants to change his reputation so he can land a respectable broadcasting job. His best friend’s sister wants to show she’s all grown up, despite her clown job (no, for real, she’s a children’s birthday party clown). So they do what all sensible adults do: They decide to fake date each other to change how others see them. Don’t let the cutesy cover fool you — “Fix Her Up” has plenty of passionate sex scenes.

Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series is one of the most beloved in the romance genre, and the first book starts off with Daphne Bridgerton entering a courtship with Duke Simon Basset. Of course, it’s a sham — Simon just needs a fair lady to marry so it looks like he’s playing by society’s rules. A Netflix adaptation based on Quinn’s series is being produced by Shonda Rhimes.

This one seems like an obvious mismatch from the start: big boxer Rhys, with his rippling muscles, seems like he’ll just rough up short-stuff Parker, an environmentalist. They wind up on the same team after assessing that partnering up comes with perks, and their relationship is an utter knockout.

How can you trust that an actor you entered a deal with to act like your boyfriend/girlfriend isn’t just, well, ACTING in the end? In Lucy Parker’s novel, two actors are pretending to date, and so, of course, they’re right in their element. But once the relationship starts to feel real, things get dicy.

For the lovers of angst, this one’s for you. College football star Drew needs local waitress Fable to pretend to be his girlfriend over Thanksgiving week in a mutually beneficial arrangement. But one week ends up being not nearly enough time for these two wary souls to mend each other’s hearts.

A modern day marriage-of-convenience plotline that tackles some tough issues around mental health and big pharma. Kat Tanner needs to enter a marriage of convenience to protect herself and her billionaire family from disaster (sly reversal of the billionaire trope is sly). But her chosen partner, selected after careful calculation, may not be as safe as she first assumed.

Maddox is not gay. He’s just pretending to be gay as a convenient excuse. It gets a little less convenient when he has to actually have a boyfriend, though. But kissing former baseball player and pretend boyfriend Damon turns out to be a lot of fun. A grand slam.

Sure, “The Hunger Games” isn’t a romance series. But it does pull off the fake dating, true love trope with aplomb (and with much higher stakes than usual). Katniss and Peeta pretend to be in love to survive the government-mandated competition where they have to kill their fellow participants. Love literally conquers all.